FROM THE LIBRARY
OF THE LATE

COLONEL HENRY T. BROCK

DONATED NOVEMBER, 1933

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LETTERS FROM JAMAICA

Edinburgh : Printed by Thomas and Archibald Constable.

FOR

EDMONSTON AND DOUGLAS.

LONDON HAMILTON, ADAMS. AND CO.

CAMBRIDGE MACMILLAN AND CO.

GLASGOW JAMES MACELHOSE.

LETTERS

FROM JAMAICA

THE LAND OF STREAMS AND WOODS.

LNNANC? SPIDKH.

EDINBURGH ■

EDMONSTON AND DOUGLAS.

1873.

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THIS LITTLE BOOK

IS INSCRIBED

TO MY WIFE

IN AFFECTIONATE REMEMBRANCE

OF OUR SOJOURN

IN JAMAICA.

a 2

PEEFACE.

The sketches which comprise this volume
were made on the spot, and pretend to being
nothing more than a truthful record of a tra-
veller's impressions of Jamaica and its people.
A few of the papers have already appeared in
print under the title of " Travel Talk."

London, May 1873.

x

CONTENTS.

OHAF. PAOE

i. IN KINGSTON HARBOUR, . . .11

11. IN KINGSTON STREETS, . . . .19

III. THROUGH THE LAGOON TO SPANISH TOWN, 30

IV. ST. J AGO DE LA VEGA, . . . .44
V. THE AMENITIES OF TROPICAL TRAVEL, . 50

VI. THE GRAND SQUARE, . 59

VII. TO THE BULLHEAD, . . . .67

VIM. BLACKS AND WHITES-A CONTRAST, . . 80

IX. COUNTRY LIFE IN JAMAICA, . . .89

X. A BATCH OF NEGRO LOVE-LETTERS, . . 103

XI. SCHOOLS AND SCHOOLMASTERS, . .111

XII. ANNANCY STORIES, .... 115

XIII. OBEAH, 131

XIV. AMONG THE MANCHESTER MOUNTAINS, . 143
XV. THE ST. ELIZABETH PLAINS, . . . 152

XVI. IN BLUEFIELDS BAY, .... 102

APPENDIX. -NEGRO PROVERBS, 175

IN KINGSTON HARBOUR.

" Well, I 'm blessed !" said the man at the wheel;
" them cussed niggers once more ! " " Eunning up
into the harbour, sir !" echoed the steward with a
face suggestive of coming fees ; " and them black
fellows in plenty awaitin* for you on the wharf."
There they were certainly — woolly heads, bare feet,
ebon faces, loud voices — all ready and waiting this fine
February morning, though the sun was hardly up, to
pounce upon us and our baggage, as we left what
had been our floating home for the last three weeks.
Eighteen days out, and prosperous winds almost all
the way. And now, in the clear bright light of a
tropical morning, we were at last in sight of the
" Land of Streams."

Of course, we had had our own share of" incidents"
to vary the weary monotony of the voyage. Our
engines had gone wrong on one occasion, as they were
in duty bound to do, and we had been delayed
twenty-four hours in consequence. For three whole
days, too, we experienced rather dirty weather ;
strong winds though fair, and heavy seas, which
made us all very uncomfortable and not a little cross.

nnuie us ;

I

12 IN KINGSTON HARBOUR.

Life on board ship becomes rather a burden when
the saloon is dark as pitch, the skylights battened
down, candles burning at meal times, and the
" fiddles " on the tables. Our meals then cease to
be the bright oases in the flat level of our exist-
ence which at other times they are felt to be.
Accidents are too frequent to be pleasant. I have a
pretty strong recollection of one evil day in particular,
when I received at breakfast the contents of the
lamp — nasty, green, rancid, evil-smelling oil — over
my plate and hands, and at lunch had the felicity of
feeling a glass of port wine gently insinuating itself
into my sleeve, " and so on upwards," until its trick-
ling course was arrested at a point considerably past
my elbow. But, in return for these discomforts, we
had the chance of seeing " sea scenery " such as we
never had witnessed before. The eye never tired of
watching the solid masses of water, the rippling
clouds of spray, the breaking, white-tipped curling
waves. Then the varying lights and colours of the
billows — grey, green, and blue at times, and some-
times in the evening, with the flush of sunset upon
them, a delicate purple, or rather a tint between
purple and magenta, which is not to be expressed in
words. It was a noble consolation, even though our
cabins were soaking with water. Then by degrees,
as we got into warmer latitudes, we came upon shoals
of flying fish, and one solitary specimen we caught.
Next our cow took ill, and one sad eve was gathered
to its fathers ; and a mysterious malady which was
not sea-sickness attacked our travelling poultry-yard.

IN KINGSTON HARBOUR. 13

But now all our troubles were over — we had arrived.
These cocoa-nut trees, and these white rocks, these
crumpled mountains, and this gently-curving bay,
was " that wondrous isle in the western seas " which
we had come five thousand miles to explore. And
truly our first view of the island, seen from the deck
of the steamer as we steamed slowly past the long
coral reef called the Palisades which guards the en-
trance to the harbour, in no degree belied our ex-
pectations. Not that Kingston itself, as it stretched
along the shore with its dingy wharves and its low-
lying dilapidated wooden houses, added much to the
beauty of the landscape. But behind and above rose
the magnificent range of the Blue Mountains, clothed,
up to their very summits, with verdure, their green
sides furrowed into many a fissure and gully by the
impetuous rains which in spring and autumn sweep
down the mountain sides and find their way to the
sea in innumerable rivers and torrents. Dotted
amongst them nestled many a white house and villa,
for here "in the hills," to use a Creoleism, is the
favourite abode of the better class of Jamaica society,
whilst at a giddy height above these, on the very
crest of the hill, and apparently amongst the clouds,
stood the military station of Newcastle, nearly 4000
feet above the sea — its snowy tents and houses
stretching away over the rocks, like a flock of sheep
on a Highland mountain. We had but time to take
a general view of the scene, when we were made fast
to our moorings at the Company's wharf.

In one moment, like the sudden apparition of a
B

14 IN KINGSTON HARBOUR.

troupe of demons in a pantomime, the ship was full
of negroes. Swarming like ants, they penetrated
into every hole and corner of the vessel. You found
them in your cabin ; you found them in the saloon.
One caught up your portmanteau, and another your
dressing-case. Grinning, laughing, shouting, quarrel-
ling, the perspiration pouring off their sable faces,
they strove and fought and squabbled over our trunks
and packages. Before I knew where I was, my
cherished travelling bag had disappeared over the
gangway; and I record with pleasure my obligations
to that most excellent of men, my bedroom steward,
for rescuing myself and the remainder of my pro-
perty from the clutches of the rapacious crew. One
by one our little travelling society began to disperse,
each on his or her different course of life. There
was the little Cuban lady with her short dress and
her high heeled boots, and her chattering not unmusi-
cal voice. There was the pair of Spaniards who sat
opposite to us at dinner and devoured the dessert
before their neighbours had finished their soup.
There was the sullen passenger whom, it was re-
ported, our good captain, for sundry high crimes and
misdemeanours, had threatened to put in irons.
There was that long, lank, sallow Brazilian, who
seemed " to carry some great sorrow next his heart,"
which he could only assuage by eating prodigious
quantities of cheese and marmalade at breakfast-time.
There was the fat English lady with her Skye terrier,
her patent washing machine, and her pots of droop-
ing fuchsias and geraniums. There was the Mora-

IN KINGSTON HARBOUR. 15

vian " brother " and his lot-selected helpmate ; and
the two planters, evidently " born near the plantain
root," who thought Jamaica was going to the devil ;
and the country shopkeeper — he called himself a
merchant and wrote J.P. after his name in the address
we presented to the captain ; and lastly there were
our noble selves, with whom we trust the reader will
in due time become better acquainted.

Scarcely had the last passenger left the ship when
began that most useful but most disagreeable of pro-
cesses— the coaling of the steamer. This service,
which is entirely performed by negroes, is said to cost
the Company, at Kingston alone, no less than £2000
a year. One after another in a long line, men and
women, black as the coals they carried, chanting a
wild recitative, and walking with that peculiar swing
which is characteristic of the black race all over the
world, they trooped up the gangway to empty their
baskets in the hold. These "coal boys," and still
more so the " coal girls," are a peculiar class. Lazy,
idle, dissolute, they do nothing between the depar-
ture of one ship and the arrival of another but loaf
round the gates of the Company's wharf, or under
the piazzas of the houses in the neighbouring streets,
eating oranges and abusing each other in the most
obscene of language.

We had the fortune to witness a fight between
two of these interesting maidens. Catching her
opponent by the neck, vixen No. 1 commenced the
attack by delivering a vigorous "buck" with her
head right in front of her antagonist — a compliment

16 IN KINGSTON HARBOUR.

which was instantly returned. Now both were wrest-
ling on the ground, legs twined with legs, and arms
with arms, and the blood flowing pretty freely on
either side. How long this might have lasted we
cannot say, for nobody seemed to think it his duty to
interfere. But just at this juncture a constable was
seen approaching, and the two termagants bleeding,
wounded, almost naked, hurling abuse at each other
all the time, with many tears and many objurga-
tions, were incontinently marched off to " the cage."
Our first business on leaving the ship was to pro-
vide ourselves with lodgings. So hailing a " 'bus,"
as the Kingston cabs are called, we started to seek
the hotel to which we had been recommended. This
" 'bus " of ours was certainly a most curious and
rudimentary structure. It was, in fact, nothing more
than a seat on wheels with poles attached to each
corner, over which a shabby piece of tarpaulin was
stretched by way of protection from the sun. Our
driver was an impish-looking boy, apparently about
fifteen, with a scarlet sash tied round his waist, and
a roll of white cotton festooned with blue calico
twisted round his somewhat indefinable head-gear.
He smoked incessantly, all the time viciously tugging
the ropes which served him for reins, and almost
sawing open the mouth of his miserable horse, which,
with bones projecting through its skin, and a weary
beseeching look in its lustreless eyes, was doing its
best to drag the over-laden vehicle through the un-
paved streets. Like almost all its fellows our 'bus
had its name — " The Lukkey " — (Query, lucky ?) con-

IN KINGSTON HARBOUR. 17

spicuously painted on its back. Some of these names
were very amusing. On our short journey up East
Street we passed " The Pride of the East," " The
People's Favourite," with a rather handsome coloured
girl seated in it ; " It shines for all," " The Army
and Navy," " Something must be done," " Self-help,"
and " The Good Time Coming."

In due time, and after a prodigious amount of
tumbling and jolting, we were landed at the door of
a large and desolate-looking building, which the driver
informed us was the " Hall " (for by this grand name
are inns known in Jamaica) to which we were bound.
We entered upon a court-yard paved with brick,
around which half-a-dozen men and women were idly
sitting. Two wall-eyed horses were being rubbed
down; sable damsels seated on the ground were wash-
ing ewers and basins and towels. A rug was being
shaken from a balcony overhead. A couple of tur-
keys, three enraged Guinea fowls, some poultry, two
goats, and a lean dog were wandering about at their
own sweet wills; and the filthy condition of the
courtyard justified the presumption that this litter
had not been removed for a week. As we were
wonderingly looking around to see whether we had
not made a mistake and entered the " curtilage " of
a private dwelling-house, one of the women, whom
we afterwards discovered to be the proprietrix of the
establishment, without rising from her chair, wished
us an indolent and indifferent " good morning." We
were about to commence an apology for our intrusion,
when she suddenly interrupted us by calling to a

18 IN KINGSTON HARBOUR.

dirty black boy who was passing, " Thomas, show
the gentlemen into the hall, and tell the house-woman
to put water into No. 24." Then, without taking
further notice of us, she turned to her next neigh-
bour and commenced a tirade upon the " vileness " of
servants in Jamaica, and of her own in particular.
Following our guide up-stairs we were ushered into
a large room, where an old negress, on her knees,
smoking the stump of a cigar with the lighted end
in her mouth, was cleaning the polished floor. Off
this central apartment the bedrooms diverged in all
directions. Into one of these we were inducted by
the sulky boy. The room was gloomy as a vault.
A bed, a chair, and a basin-stand constituted all the
furniture. A little strip of matting by our bedside
was all our carpet. There were few traces of that
West Indian luxury of which we had heard so much
before leaving home. Breakfast was served to us in
a broad verandah overlooking the street. "We had
oysters from the mangrove trees at Port Eoyal, a
brilliant scarlet " snapper," an excellent fish, but, like
all tropical fishes, soft and flabby in substance ;
brain fritters, a small biscuit called "crackers" soaked
in butter, stuffed "garden eggs," a most delicious
vegetable, roasted plantains, a piled-up plate of
golden oranges and a pine-apple. Our drink was
iced water, but tea and coffee were to be had for
the asking. Such was our first meal in Jamaica.

II.

IN KINGSTON STREETS.

Kingston has all the characteristics of a town
which has lost its self-respect. Like a man who has
seen better days, it has given up attending even to
its personal appearance. " It looks what it is," said
Sewell, who visited it in 1860 — "a place where money
has been made, but can be made no more. It is used
up, and cast aside as useless." * Broken walls, charred
beams, crumbling ruins meet one in all directions.
Harbour Street, the main thoroughfare, is unpaved ;
and gutters to carry off the heavy rains which fall at
certain seasons of the year are unknown. At such
times the streets are rivers ; business is suspended ;
many of the stores do not take down their shutters,
and the miserable town looks more miserable than
ever.

It would be difficult to imagine a place whose
general aspect depresses one so much as Kingston.
The town rises gradually from the sea to the height
of about 100 feet. It reaches its highest elevation
at the racecourse, and its lowest at the Company's
wharf. Between the two, and right in the middle

1 Ordeal of Free Labour in the British West Indies, p. 175.
New York. 1861.

20 IN KINGSTON STREETS.

of the city, is the Parade ; an open square presently-
being laid out by Government as a garden, with a
waterless fountain in the midst, and a statue of Lord
Metcalfe. Facing each other, top and bottom, are
the Theatre and the Parish Church. The other two
sides of the square are occupied by the old barracks
(soon to be converted into a handsome court-house),
and a church built of red brick, belonging, we be-
lieve, to the Wesleyan denomination.

Owing to the unmodulated flatness of its site,
Kingston, from the water, presents the appearance of
a mere confused mass of sun-baked buildings. Close
to the sea, truly, stands a large circular iron build-
ing recently erected by the Government as a metro-
politan market ; but here, as was right and proper
in a case where public money was to be expended,
convenience has been studied in preference to beauty;
and the structure, though handsome enough of its
kind, can hardly be said to add much to the amenity
of the landscape. The only other architectural fea-
ture which breaks the dull monotony of the sky-line
is what looks like a little white pigeon-cot hidden
away at the back of the town. This is the spire of
the Parish Church, and the only attempt at a spire
in Kingston ; and doubtless the good people of the
town would be very proud of it, were it not that the
Spanishtonians, between whom and the Kingstonians
there exists a feeling of jealousy, not to say a feud,
possess one attached to their cathedral exactly of the
same shape and size, and situated in very nearly the
same position in their midst.

IN KINGSTON STREETS. 21

There is a marvellous lack of appreciation of the
beautiful in the Creole mind.1 Tropical towns are
generally little more than a group of barns and sheds.
The public buildings are pre-eminently the former :
the private buildings are too often little better than
the latter. This is the more remarkable, because the
sites of these towns, especially when they date back,
as many of them do, to the old Spanish days, have
been selected with a wonderful eye to their natural
surroundings — at the head of land-locked bays,
perched on rocky crags, or commanding some wide
and spreading view of strath or sea, of bold and
escarped mountain, or green and cane-covered plain.

In Kingston, the streets, although laid out on the

most formal and geometrical principles, are clumsy

and irregular. The houses, with their steep, shingled

roofs, are of all sorts and sizes. They cannot even

boast " a picturesque confusion." Most of them are

fronted with covered verandahs called " piazzas,"

provided with jalousies to fend off the vertical sun,

which gives them the cheerful look of houses shut

up for the season, whilst the family are out of town.

The principal entrance is as often on the second

storey as on the first, and at the side of the house

rather than in the front. The ordinary arrangement

of a Jamaica house is something like this : Entering

1 The word Creole, in its literal acceptation, simply means a
person born in the West Indies, independent of all complexional
distinctions. In England " it is most commonly used to express
a mulatto ; " but it is a mistake to suppose, as The Saturday Re-
view in an article on Creole Grammar (March 26, 1870) lays it
down, that " its strict meaning is a native of a colony, of European
race, as opposed to an immigrant."

22 IN KINGSTON STREETS.

upon the piazza, which is fitted up with rocking
chairs and ottomans, you pass to the drawing-room,
off which the bedrooms diverge on every side. The
dining-room is generally upon the ground floor, and to
reach this you have either to descend by a trap stair
or by the same outside staircase by which you gained
admission to the drawing-room. The bedrooms,
especially in country houses, are small and ill ven-
tilated. In " old time " houses the only room of
anything like decent dimensions is the dining-room
— a striking instance of the social habits of the
colony in its so-called palmy days.

There are no public buildings worthy of the name
in Kingston as yet. The churches, except in one or
two instances, are without the slightest claims to
architectural beauty. The Parish Church is remark- ■
able only from its old mahogany altar-screen, and the
antiquity of some of its monuments. Close before
the altar-rails lie the remains of the gallant Admiral
Benbow; and the old song still commemorates

" How the people thronged very much
To see brave Admiral Benbow laid in Kingston town church."

The Church of England has never been the church
of the colony ; consequently the number of Dissent-
ing chapels, both in Kingston and throughout the
island, far exceeds those belonging to the (Dis-)
Establishment. The Baptists, Jews, Wesleyans,
Methodists, the Established and Free Churches
of Scotland, Moravians, Eoman Catholics, and In-
dependents, all have numerous places of worship of
their own.

IN KINGSTON STREETS. 23

Of the public establishments of the colony, the
best conducted are the General Penitentiary, the
Lunatic Asylum, and the Public Hospital. The
ruling principle of the two former is the utilisa-
tion of the labour of the inmates. In the former
brick and tile making, coir and oakum picking,
boat building, printing, and lime burning are suc-
cessfully carried on. In the country districts the
convicts in the local prisons are employed in road
making, pasture cleaning, and other agricultural
works. In Kingston the streets are cleaned and kept
in repair by their labour. In the General Peniten-
tiary the treadmill is used to grind corn. The female
prisoners, who are brought into the prison under
masks as hideous as those of a San Benito, do all
the washing of the establishment, and also the ships'
washing for the steamers of the Eoyal Mail Com-
pany. Up to a very recent period, the hair of all
women undergoing punishment with hard labour,
in the Penitentiary, was cut off on their entering
the establishment, and, as at home, no part of their
punishment was felt more. We have been told by
an official connected with the prison establishment
in the colony, that it was a common practice for a
woman who felt herself pretty sure of being con-
victed, to cut off her wool before her trial, and give
it to a friend to keep for her until her term of
" labour at the Penn," as the negroes jocularly call
it, was over. On coming out, it could easily be
tacked on again to her head by the help of a needle
and thread. Her thick bandana handkerchief would,

24 IN KINGSTON STREETS.

of course, conceal all traces of the operation. Within
the last year, however, the cropping of female con-
victs' hair has been abolished by the Governor.

Deserters from the road gangs are punished with
iron collars fastened round their necks. Women
endure solitary confinement in a detached turret
called the punishment tower. The negro prisoners
have the thick iron doors of their cells closed during
both the day and the night ; the white prisoners, on
the other hand, are confined behind an iron grating,
which admits both air and light.

To the negro imprisonment is no disgrace, and
even with hard labour very little punishment.
During his incarceration he lives in clover. He is
fed much better than he is at home. His clothes,
albeit they are more like rice-sacks than anything
else, are sufficient for his wants. The actual depri-
vation of freedom is a sentimental luxury with which
he can readily dispense.

He returns to his country district, on the expira-
tion of his sentence, a made-man in the estimation
of all his neighbours. We remember a case where
a man, on coming out of prison, after undergoing a
long sentence of penal servitude, was met by his
friends at the entrance of his native village, mounted
on horseback, and in this gallant style conducted to
his home, where a feast awaited him. A " dance "
and its accompaniments concluded the " demonstra-
tion " of that eventful day.

It is a decided misfortune to the traveller arriv-
ing in Jamaica to be landed in the early morning,

IN KINGSTON STREETS. 25

as was our miserable lot. Breakfast was over by
nine o'clock ; and there was the day before us ; and
in this country "in the day no man can work." But
we could not rest in the house. So mounting " pug-
rees " and white umbrellas, we sallied forth immedi-
ately after breakfast to make acquaintance with the
Kingston streets. By this time all the town was
alive, and Harbour Street was crowded. Clerks and
shopmen were hurrying to their respective offices
and stores, some on foot, some in 'buses, and not a
few in buggies.. Handsome equipages were dashing
past : this, with a merchant on his way to his count-
ing-house ; that, with a party of ladies going shop-
ping before the heat became intense. Higglers of all
descriptions were vigorously plying their trade.
Coolies with baskets of vegetables on their heads ;
girls with cedar-boxes full of sugar cakes of every
kind ; boys with bundles of walking-sticks ; vendors
of tripe and " chickling ; " men with trays of king-
fish. At the corners of the streets, with little boxes
by their sides, women were selling pins and tapes
and braids. There stood one with a basket of parched
maize on her head ; here another tempted you with
a heap of rosy apples which the ice-ship had just
brought over from America ; a third offered you a
little saucerful of Alpine strawberries, brought down
that morning from the Newcastle hills; whilst another
exposed some magnificent artichokes, which had also
been grown amongst the mountains. Each had his
or her sptcialitL Nobody had more than one kind
of article to sell. He who sold booby eggs had

26 IN KINGSTON STREETS.

nothing to do with the vendor of eggs of ordinary
poultry. The dealer in radishes sold neither carrots
nor turnips. If you wanted fruit, you had to buy
your bananas from one person, your oranges from a
second, and your pine-apples from a third. It was
impossible to avoid the feeling that we were in a
foreign city, and surrounded by a foreign population.
These people spoke English, it is true ; but English
which we had the greatest difficulty to understand.
The tones and inflections of their voices, the indolent
" yawny-drawly " way, to use Coleridge's phrase, in
which every word was pronounced, the shrill pitch
of their sentences, were not English, whatever the
words might have been. Then, too, the streets
were filled with men of all nationalities, and of every
shade of colour. There were yellow Chinamen,
lanky Americans, fat and comfortable-looking Jews,
lively midshipmen from the men-of-war at Port
Royal, coolies from Madras, and Scotchmen from
Aberdeen. We met several parties of Cuban ladies,
with mantillas over their heads, and several Haitiens
were pointed out, whom recent events had driven
away from their own country. Of beggars we saw
very few, and these were chiefly lepers. Begging
does not seem to pay in this country. One wretched
creature, suffering from that particular form of the
disease which goes by the African name of " coco-
bay," asked us for an alms. His hands and feet
were toeless and fingerless masses, and his arm had
withered up almost to his elbow. It is one of the
disgraces of Jamaica that such loathsome objects

IN KINGSTON STREETS. 27

should be allowed to go at large. The street cries
were neither very musical nor very amusing. They
seemed all to be uttered in a whining, nasal, dis-
contented tone, and at the shrillest possible pitch.
" Eipe mangoes gwine (going) past ! " was more like
a complaint than an invitation to purchase. " Coffee,
sixpence a quart ! " might have been a wail of anguish,
for aught we knew to the contrary. " Starch ! " was a
most unmistakeable scream, and " Fresh oysters gwine
past ! " more like an Irish " croon " than anything
we had heard in our lives. At the door of one of the
large haberdashery stores, we overheard a funny con-
versation between two fashionably-dressed coloured
girls, which amusingly illustrates their fondness for
over-adornment in all things, even in their language.
" Marning, ma'am ! " said Jane to Justina, eyeing her
from head to foot, and doubtless admiring with just
the faintest suspicion of envy her brilliant bandana
and her long flowing skirts, her gaudy rings, and
drooping earrings. " Marning, ma'am ! how you feel
yourself to-day 1 " " Pretty so-so, I tank you."
" Quite warm to-day," continued the other, fanning
herself. " Yes, ma'am," was the reply ; " indeed, the
heatment is very greatment ! " " Yes, ma'am ! " And
making each other a low curtsey, the two friends
parted. The " heatment " had indeed grown un-
pleasantly " greatment," and the glare from the
broiling streets was making us nearly blind. With
soaking garments and streaming countenances, we
made our way back to the hotel, and there, divested
of almost all our garments, we lounged in hammocks

28 IN KINGSTON STREETS.

and rocking-chairs, drinking iced sangaree and sweet-
ened lime-juice, and smoking innumerable cigars,
until it was time to dress for our afternoon drive.

Killing time in the tropics is no easy matter ; and
how we should have spent this long weary day we
know not, had not good luck placed in our way a
file of Jamaica newspapers. The general tone of
these journals — of which we afterwards learned the
colony supported no less than seven — was one of
extreme animosity to each other and to all the world
besides, except that favoured class which they called
"our readers." Some of the advertisements were
especially amusing. Trades-people seemed to attempt
to outvie each other in the absurdity of their an-
nouncements. A livery stable-keeper says : —

" Something may be done ! Something can be
done ! Something shall be done ! Something will
be done ! Something must be done ! If the prices
are made to suit the times, now come, something
worth knowing. The cheapest stables, at Goodman
Mordecai to defy competition. Carriages and pair
to funerals, at 8s. ; horse and buggy to funerals, at
4s.; carriages and pair to wedding, at 10s.; and a
pair of horses for hearse, at 6s."

Another, in Spanish Town, heads his advertise-
ment : —

" Livery ! Livery ! Livery !

" This is a New Year, and it behoves every man
to turn over a new leaf. How many will profit by
this is doubtful ; but as charity begins at home, it is
as well we see the beam in our eyes before we look

IN KINGSTON STREETS. 29

at the mote in our brother's. To those who have
hitherto kindly patronized us, we thank. To those
who intend to patronize us, we will be more thankful.
To those who are indebted to us, we beg to shell up.
And to those we owe, we ask a little patience.
There is a time for everything. A time to mourn,
a time to laugh. A time to pay debts, and a time
to trust again ; and as it now happens to be the time
for paying debts, we beg those who are indebted to
us to square up, to enable us to put all square. We
are happy to inform the public that ' poor old Trust '
gave up the ghost on the 31st December, and we
sincerely hope that his heirs and successors will not
pay us a visit. We desire to live in charity and
brotherly love one towards another, more especially
those who carry on a similar business, always bear-
ing in mind that when rogues quarrel honest men
come by their own."

H. C. advertises his umbrellas in the following
style : —

" Umbrellas ! Umbrellas ! — Papa always told me
to provide against a rainy day, so I have bought all
these umbrellas. The subscriber begs to call the
immediate attention of the public in general to a
large collection of the above article, and recommends
their providing themselves with one or more of this
very useful commodity, so as to obviate the disagree-
ableness of borrowing from their friends during the
rainy season."

The negroes are especially appealed to in the fol-
lowing : —

30 IN KINGSTON STREETS.

" Tax Collector Again ! — Ow — Dis Money ! Dis
Money ! ! Why Jacob no pay him taxes I wonder.
Ah ! Old woman say— ' Tan far — see better ' — You
no know Jacob yet — him a goin' a Kingston fa de
races, and him putten' up all dat money fe buy
saddle from John Madonald shop by de Marning
Journal office, where all de sportin' gentleman buy
harness. Jacob no pay no tax till after races oba' ! !
I know it ! ! ! Jacob too trickify ! ! ! But mother —
you know hearie what Judge Blair tell Jim de
oder day, when him beg fa' two mont' fa' pay Massa
Thompson 1 Him say, so sweety to Jim — ( No Jim —
you will be spendin' you' money fa' Christmas and
de races — and you owe Mr. Thompson dis money
now — No Jim! you must pay it in one month.'
Jacob betta' take care wid him saddle. Pay tax
fuss, and buy saddle noder time ! ! ! "

A store-keeper on the north side gives this, —

" Notice — To young men about to marry ! A
magnificent brass 4 post canopy bedstead just landed,
will be sold a great bargain."

A dentist heads his advertisement with a ghastly
woodcut representing a set of false teeth, surrounded
with extracted stumps of all descriptions, and all the
instruments of his craft. A house-owner offers, in a
curious misprint, " For lease or rent, that desirable
family country residence, Depass'-Delight (Famished)."
Bitterly sarcastic are some in their terms. A wharf-
inger gives " Notice — There are some persons in this
town who gives a great deal of trouble and annoy-
ance in paying freight per droghers — and dare say

IN KINGSTON STREETS. 31

the parties alluded to will understand." A quaint
intimation of marriage is thus given : —

"Grey Town, 15th November 1869. Notice.—
The undersigned hereby notifies the public of Jamaica,
from unavoidable and indispensable reasons, that it is
his intention to be married at the above-named place ;
so that if hereafter any objections be made to the said
marriage, they may be null and void. — J. K."

A wife having left her husband's protection, he
gives the following : —

" Caution. — Whereas my wife, S. R, having left
my care and protection, and is gone home to her
parents (refusing any longer to serve me, and thus
ceasing to be my wife), this is to give notice that
if I find her in my provision ground from and after
date — which she is in the habit of destroying — I
shall proceed against her as a trespasser, according
to law."— P. E."

Of the same character is the following : —

"Hurloch, St. James, 9th October 1871. Caution.
— The undersigned hereby cautions the public against
giving any credit to his wife, E. H. (an African), as
he will not be responsible for any debts she may
contract ; therefore, whoever gives her credit will do
so in their own wrong. his

J. x H.
mark."

As a specimen of an obituary notice, the following
is probably unique : —

32 IN KINGSTON STREETS.

"Died at one of her son's (sic) residence, B's
Penn, in the parish of Clarendon,

Miss Susan S ,

Aged about eighty years. For many years she re-
sided and was many years sole manager of her own
penn, K's M., in the parish of Clarendon.

" She was truly a mother in Israel, and her remains
were followed to their last resting-place by almost
all the respectable inhabitants of F. P., and a large
number of her own relatives.

" The deceased has left a number of children and
grandchildren to mourn their irreparable loss.
May she rest in peace"

The last quotation we shall give is the follow-
ing:—

"St Ann's Bay, March 14, 1870.— It being
rumoured in this, and other parts of the island, that
I have contracted a marriage in England : This is to
authorize any person or persons who are able to prove
the same, to come forward, or communicate with the
Inspector of Constabulary of this Parish ; as a safe-
guard against the public, as I mean to enter into such
arrangements the first opportunity afforded me. —
W. G. M. B."

Towards five o'clock the town, which had been
during the heat of the day like a city of the dead,
began to brisk up wonderfully. Jalousies were
opened. Ladies in evening dress — low bodies, bare
arms, and faces whitened with jpoudre de ris — ap-
peared at the windows, or were discovered lounging
on rocking chairs in the piazzas. Carriages, too,

IN KINGSTON STREETS. 33

commenced to reappear on the streets, filled with
ladies and children and portly fathers of families
going for their evening drive. As it happened to be
" band " night, we took a carriage and drove to Up
Park Camp, where, underneath a spreading cotton
tree, we heard the band of the 3d West India Regi-
ment discourse much excellent music. "We were,
however, disappointed to find only about half-a-dozen
carriages present, and these for the most part were
occupied by Jewesses. Some officers on horseback, a
few pale-faced children seated under a tree with
their black nurses, and a score of idle, lounging
black soldiers in Zouave uniform, made up the whole
of the company. Amongst the latter we were
pointed out several old Africans ; and if their looks
might be taken as an index to their character, one
would be inclined to consider them as savage as
when they came from their native Guinea. We sub-
sequently discovered this was really the case. They
never lose their barbarous ferocity. When enraged
they are no more responsible for their actions than
the tiger which has tasted blood. Under a popular
colonel they may make good soldiers in war : they
are said to be rather dangerous customers in times
of peace. The citizens of Kingston — not a very
warlike crew, it must be confessed — congratulate
themselves that Up Park Camp is at least two miles
out of town. To such old savages the restraints of
civilisation are a gene and an incumbrance. Shoes
and gloves are especially distasteful to them. " Bar-
rackie fe handie " (barracks for the hands), said one

34 IN KINGSTON STREETS.

fellow with filed teeth and face tattooed with his
" country marks," to a friend of mine — " Barrackie
fe handie bad enough ; but barrackie fe footie, tooey
bad, tooey bad."

Town life in Kingston is strikingly sombre and
unexciting. There are few amusements either public
or private. Dinner parties are rare events. The
little theatre on the Parade is opened, on an average,
twice a year — once for the performance of a local
amateur company ; on the other, for that of a stray
professor of legerdemain on his way home from
Panama. Not long ago it was taken by an itinerant
performer on the flying trapeze. But the Kingston
press was so shocked by the impropriety of the wife
and daughter of the unfortunate man taking part in
the entertainment, that- after a couple of nights' per-
formances he was compelled to close his doors.

It was half-past seven before we returned to our
hotel for dinner. The fierce sea breeze — which had
lasted all day, and which from its healthful effects
the Creoles call " the doctor " — had died down, and
the " land " breeze had not yet set in. Night had
come upon us suddenly as we were driving home
from camp — for in this country there is no twilight
— and the stars, to use a negro idiom, were " sprink-
ling the sky." As in the early morning, the streets
were full of people. We passed several men with
little glass models of houses brilliantly illuminated
on their heads, yelling out what sounded to us like
" I scream!" at the pitch of their unmusical voices.
They were, however, only vendors of ice creams — a

IN KINGSTON STREETS. 35

luxury which, strange to say, is to be got in this
burning land at no other hour of the day. Then
came by a woman with a basket of roasted pindar
or ground nuts (Arachis Hypogcea) on her head. Of
all the street cries we had heard during the day
this was the only one which had either music or
rhythm about it. It was a plaintive little melody
in the minor key, not very appropriate to the words,
it must be confessed. But it came prettily in be-
tween the strains of a rattling set of quadrilles which
issued from a house on the other side of the road,
and we rather regretted when she turned the corner
of a neighbouring street, and her

" Pindar buy, young gentlemen !
Pindar buy, young ladies !
Pindar buy, young gentlemen !
Pindar, pindar, buy !"

was heard by us no more.

III.

THROUGH THE LAGOON TO SPANISH TOWN.

We had grown very tired of Kingston and its heat
and its mosquitoes. We had turned veritable pieds
poudreux with tramping over its dusty streets, and
were sick even unto death with chaffering with trades-
men, and trying to induce them to charge only double
price for everything we wanted. It was therefore
with no sigh of regret that one dull grey morning,
about six A.M., we found our travelling buggy at the
door, and ourselves starting on our tour round the
island.

As we passed through the hall, on our way down-
stairs, we discovered the old house-cleaner on her
knees, hard at work on the floors as usual. In the
laziness of her spirit and the stiffness of her old
joints, she was grumbling over her daily task.

" My father ! de floor tough dis morning ! " she
said, as we came up with our cloaks and umbrellas,
and railway rugs over our arms.

She looked when she saw our preparations for
departure. "Hi, massa! you gwine away, sa?" she

DEPARTURE TO SPANISH TOWN. 37

asked in some surprise, "and de day look quite
mournful too ! It mak me feel quite sad to see you
gwine away, sa ! Yes ! " she continued, in a tone of
melancholy soliloquy — " husban's an' wives mus' part;
parients an' childring mus' part ; how much more de
bes' of friends! — Tank you, sa!" she went on, as
we dropped a coin into her bony hands, " an' a safe
trabel to you, massa, an' me hopes me will meet you
in heaben."

" Let us hope we may meet again on earth," we
said, the lady looked so disconsolate.

" P'raps, massa ; but you young an' me old, you
see. Dat mak de differench. But me do hope me
may meet you in heaben. Don't you think it will be
delightful to be in heaben, massa 1 — Noting to do, no
work, no boderation, no cleaning, no noting; but
always to fold me hand, and to sit down chattering
with me Saviour. Yes, massa ! " said the old crea-
ture, warming up into a frenzy of religious ardour.
" Ef me did not know me was a sacred girl of the
Lord, me heart would quail and grow soft before
Massa Lord ! An' to tink of de judgment ! " she pur-
sued, " when we all shall raise up out of our grabes
in a lump ! But me bery old, for true. Me fader
Guinea man, an' me moder Creole, an' me bery old
woman now ! Good-bye den, sa ! God bless you ! "
and she turned to her scrubbing and polishing again.

All this time the dura ilia of our buggy were being
crammed with portmanteaus and travelling-bags,
guns, butterfly-nets, and all the impedimenta of the
holiday traveller in England. A good friend had

38 THROUGH THE LAGOON

recommended our taking with us a supply of " tinned
productions," to supply the deficiencies of country
lodging-houses ; and if we had acted on all the other
recommendations we received, we should have carried
with us, in addition to the host of unnecessary rub-
bish which we did take, such useful articles as a
photographic camera, a mountain-barometer, a Nor-
wegian kitchen, wading-boots, a bull's-eye lantern, a
large ham, a complete set of ice-buckets, a boot-jack,
and a fishing-rod.

By the time everything was packed there was
barely room in the buggy to stow ourselves away.

How these two poor goose-necked, fiddle-headed
screws — these " soldier-officer horses," as a passing
negro gamin sarcastically called them, which had
been spared to us on hire for the ridiculously small
sum of one pound per diem — were to drag this im-
posing load was a mystery which we vainly strove
to solve. But they started gallantly enough, and
our hopes rose, as, under the constant application of
the whip, and loud encouraging cries from our driver
Bob, we galloped at full speed through the empty
streets.

And here let us introduce our faithful Bob to the
readers attention.

He was a sprightly enough young negro when
first he entered, our service, with the features of a
baboon, silky wool (for his mother was a French
Creole), and a mouth of indescribable ugliness. He
was exceedingly conversible, as we subsequently
found to our cost, and was given to singing, although

TO SPANISH TOWN. 39

lie had neither voice nor ear. So long as he rubbed

down his horses to such choice songs as

" Ould lady ! lend me your daughter ;
Five cents go to a quarter,"

or

or even

Cherata ! Gordon ! him hang on wire

" Monkey, monkey, play de fiddle,"
all went well ; and if we were starting for a journey
we could calculate on the buggy being ready in at
least two hours after we had ordered it. But if he
happened to be in a bad humour, or in low spirits,
or if he had had an extra glass of rum and water
the night before, his melody would take the form of
the most grewsome chants he had ever heard, and we
knew that our arrangements were doomed for the
day.

Excuses were always ready when Bob did not wish
to travel. He would himself break off a horse's
shoe, and then tell us he could not start until it was
shod. He would cut the harness on purpose to
delay us by having it mended.

His especial weakness was for tobacco and dress.
On Sundays, or when visiting friends, Bob's manifold
changes of raiment were the delight of himself and
the envy of all his fellow-servants. How he managed
to carry about with him his marvellously extensive
wardrobe I never was able to ascertain.

He prided himself on his education too. No
matter how pressed we were for time, he would read
his Bible for an hour every morning, seated in a

40 THROUGH THE LAGOON

conspicuous position in the yard, where he might be
seen of men. He was an " inquirer " of the Wes-
leyan denomination, and but for some amiable fleshly
failings would long ago have been admitted a
" member."

" But I expects to become one dis year," he said,
when he told us all this.

Then in his woody treble he commenced the well-
known revival hymn : —

1 ' Let us go all togeder, all togeder, all togeder,
Let us go all togeder to de blessed land above ;
Come my fader and my moder, my sister and my broder,
Let us go all togeder to de blessed land above."

We had decided to go over to Spanish Town by
road, instead of by rail, for reasons which need not
here be stated.

The first few miles of our journey were very unin-
teresting. The country was a dead level. The
road ran between hedges of dildoes, with here and
there a distant view of the sea glittering like a bur-
nished mirror in the sunlight. For a background
we had the eternal hills, on which the shadows lit
and fled with ever-varying effects, which would have
delighted an artist.

Occasionally we passed a bush of prickly pear, a
lignum- vitae tree, a group of Turk's-head cacti, a
flock of goats, or a whirling cyclone of dust. We
were glad of anything to break the monotony of that
straight, endless, " faultily faultless " road.

Once — rare chance— we met a beggar. He was a
wretched old man, perfectly blind, with fleshless legs

TO SPANISH TOWN. 41

and great splay feet. His sole clothing consisted of
a staff and a scanty pair of trousers. Hearing the
rumble of our approaching carriage he flung himself
on his knees in the middle of the road, with his lean
bony hand outstretched for charity.

" I beg you, massa ! I beg you, massa ! I beg you,
massa-a-a!" he cried, in a whining crescendo, like
the wail of an Australian dingo.

In England such a man would end his days in the
workhouse. Here he can only be placed on the
" porpus " list, as the negroes call the pauper list, of
his parish, and will probably be allowed to die by
the roadside. The coroner will hold an inquest upon
him, if the John Crows do not save him the trouble.
The witnesses will prove that he was a poor, useless,
good-for-nothing waif of humanity, whom nobody
owned. The jury will bring in a verdict of " Found
dead," and perhaps the parish may bury him.

Almost midway between Kingston and Spanish
Town is a wide lagoon, from which exhales at night
so fetid a miasma that few persons care to travel
across it after dark. High banks of bulrushes wav-
ing on either side of the road ; black pools of standing
water, where wild-duck bob and splash ; convol-
vuli weaving themselves into thick veils of greenery,
and mantling every tree ; here and there a group of
water lilies ; — such is this dreary, dismal swamp. Of
nights, a low-lying mist, — " essence of owl," as the
Indians call it — " essence of fever," as it might more
justly be described, — broods darkly over the scene.
But the negroes fear it not ; and night after night

42 THROUGH THE LAGOON

come out with torches of split bamboos to catch the
large morass crabs, which burrow in its putrid soil.
Dazzled and blinded by the glare of the light, the
crab is unable to reach its hole, and falls an easy-
prey to its captors.

About a mile and a half further on is a large ceiba
or cotton tree, which has had the honour of being
described in every book of travels that has been
written about Jamaica. It holds its head very high
in consequence. Its circumference is between twelve
and fourteen feet. The little cotton-tree sparrows
make their nests in its branches, and in the but-
tresses of its trunk reside a colony of macoco beetles,
a delicacy as dear to the negro as the snail or frog
to a Frenchman.

There is no more striking feature in the Jamaica
scenery than one of those noble trees, which not un-
commonly reach a height of from seventy to a hun-
dred feet, its roots expanding into angular buttresses
sometimes eight or ten feet high, covered up to the
summit with wild pines and other parasitical plants,
and with long rope-like withes depending from its
highest branches. As timber it is worthless; but
the body is sometimes fashioned into canoes, which
are occasionally fifty feet long, and capable of hold-
ing eight or nine hogsheads of sugar.

" Cracious ! " said Bob, clutching my hand as I
was in the act of hurling my stick at the tree to
bring down a waxy orchid which had attracted my
attention. " Don't do dat, massa, if you please ! "

"Not throw my stick at the tree, Bob 1 Nonsense ! "

TO SPANISH TOWN. 43

" For true, massa ! No, massa. I beg you quite
hard."

"But why not, Bob?"

" Massa don't understand dese tings : but cotton
tree bery comical tree, an' if you did trow dat stick
I an' you wouldn' lib to de end of de year ! "

Such was our first introduction to negro super-
stitions.

" Massa eber hear de nigger proverb 'bout cotton
tree ? "

" No, Bob. I don't think we have."

" Well, you know, * when cotton tree fall, billy-
goat jump over him;' but den de old-time people say,
1 By am bye buckra (gentleman's) dog catch billy-
goat by him ear, an' mek him cry Ba-a-a! ' Ha! ha!
ha ! " and Bob laughed hilariously at the wit of the
saying.

From this till we reached Spanish Town nothing
worthy of notice occurred. It was breakfast-time
when we entered the dusty streets of the old dead
capital of the island, and right glad indeed were we
to pull up at the door of our friend's house, and dis-
appear into the recesses of his cool, dark, hospit-
able mansion.

IV.

ST. JAGO DE LA VEGA.

Spanish Town, or St. Jago de la Vega, is the
capital dejure, whilst Kingston is the capital de facto,
of Jamaica.

One of the most ancient cities in the colony, the
seat of government, and once the home of all that
was wise and learned and distinguished in Jamaica
society, it is now a waste and a desert. Long-tailed
pigs wander about the streets; carrion-crows pick
up garbage in its once thronged thoroughfares. At
the back of the handsome square where King's
House is situated, the negroes have built their
shingled huts.

Everything connected with it is dull and languid.
The few officials whose duties keep them there are
gloomy and dispirited j and the occasional balls,
which, like angels' visits few and far between, waken
the echoes in the old ball-room of Government House,
only by the contrast render the desertion more
marked and the solitude more appalling.

Yet wandering through its deserted streets one
cannot but feel that after all there was a time when

ST. JAGO DE LA VEGA. 45

Spanish Town was indeed a city. The very houses,
albeit they are tumbling to pieces, have an air of
aristocracy about them to which those in Kingston
have no pretension ; and what we seek for in vain
in every other part of the colony, viz., traces of its
ancient grandeur, we find in St. Jago de la Vega.

Looking at these antiquated mansions, with the
numbers still on their doors, we can imagine the
days when governors and bishops and judges held
high festival within. What visions of jerked hog
and black crab, of turtle-soup and old Madeira,
does the sight of them produce ! What pictures do
they conjure up of those wicked old times when
aides-de-camp used to ride alligators through the
streets, when admirals used to give balls to the brown
girls of the town, when vice in every shape was more
reputable than it is at present ! Is there a single
bottle of the old Madeira extant 1 Does any one re-
member the the Hell Fire Club ? Is there any one
alive who has tasted Bath punch !

The old barn-like cathedral of Spanish Town con-
tains a few good monuments ; notably one to Lady
Elgin, by Steell of Edinburgh. There is an epitaph,
too, to the memory of a departed functionary, which
we cannot refrain from giving, as an edifying instance
of Creole modesty. Under the medallion of M. T.
Cicero we read : —

46 ST. JAGO DE LA VEGA.

Near this place are interred

the remains of i

HUGH LEWIS, Esquire,

Barrister-at-law, His Majesty's Advocate-General for this Island,,

and

Eepresentative in Assembly for the Parish of Port-Royal.

He was born the 2d August 1753.

He died the 23d January 1785.

Early and zealously attached to the profession of the law,

which nature had prepared him to adorn,

He cultivated her partial endowments

with unremitting assiduity.

To a voice, clear and strong,

To action, graceful and affecting,

He added knowledge the most accurate and extensive.

Superior, both from integrity and ability,

To the meanness of sophistry,

His arguments at the Bar were rational and forcible,

His eloquence in the Senate dignified and persuasive.

Though by his merit raised with unusual rapidity

To the highest honours of his profession ;

Yet such was his liberality and condescension,

So truly benevolent was he, and sincere,

That he enjoyed the uncommon felicity

To be

Unenvied by any,

The delight and admiration of all.

Dating back from the Spanish days — and it is
worthy of remark that, with the exception of Sevilla
Nueva in St. Ann's, all the great Spanish settle-
ments were on the south side of the island — the
history of Spanish Town is the history of the colony.
Under its Spanish masters it had its abbey, its chapels,
and its convents \ but beside a magnificent avenue
of tamarind trees, which marks the site of the Spanish
Governor's house, and a quaint old bridge across the
Eio Cobre near the Bog Walk, no remains of that
age exist.

ST. JAGO DE LA VEGA. 47

Then came the English conquest, with its long bede-
roll of names, which are household words in English
naval history. In its streets the struggle between
cavaliers and roundheads was enacted as fiercely
as at home, and a local antiquary, the Honourable
Richard Hill, states in one of his works that the
common negro ejaculations of " My father ! " and
" 0 King ! " used to express surprise or astonish-
ment, date back from these times. Those were the
days of the buccaneers too. One of them, Sir Thomas
(or, as he is sometimes called, Sir Henry) Morgan,
actually rose to be Governor of Jamaica, and very-
odd and not altogether edifying stories are still told
of the great doings which used to take place in
King's House under his reign.

From that date up to the time when the House of
Assembly became a power both for good and for evil
in the colony, with the exception of a few negro
insurrections, nothing worthy of record ensued. In
1692, the city was severely damaged by the earth-
quake which destroyed Port Royal, a town which
was fast becoming a dangerous rival to Spanish
Town — now, alas ! like it, a city of the dead. And
then began what the Creoles still consider to have
been the palmy days of this colony, when great for-
tunes were made and spent by Scotch and English
adventurers ; when political jobs were rife ; and
when the island — unhappy island ! — was alternately
governed by a knot of needy lawyers, or ignorant,
purse-proud planters, just as the one party or the
other happened to be in power.

" 'Twas Self and Party after all, for all the stir they made."

48 ST. JAGO DE LA VEGA.

Yet even to this day there are men who regret
the old House of Assembly. As for its members,
" the one half," in the words of Hector Mitchell, the
first mayor of Kingston, " could not afford to be
in it, nor the other half to be out of it." " The
brown men ruined it," it was once remarked to me ;
" they were so poor, so 'greedy, and so fond of hear-
ing themselves speak. They were mostly all law-
yers ; and although they habitually lived on green
plantains and salt fish, spoke as if they were rich
planters, feeding sumptuously every day on turtle-
soup and old Madeira." The House of Assembly
was a free institution, and had its black members as
well. One of the most famous of these was a decent
old negro, named Vickers, who was member for St.
Catherine's. He used to ride up to the House on a
dray, clad in a green coat, with brass buttons, a
white hat, and bare feet. Of course, like every
other member of the Colonial Parliament, he had the
entree into society, and a negro song still commemo-
rates his behaviour at a ball given in Kingston : —

" Den one celebrate black gentleman, de member for St. Cat,
Him pop into de supper-room, like a half-starved cane-piece rat,
Him say * him belly pinch him,' so begin fe wag him jaw,
Begin fe finding fault, say de duck was roasted raw.
Our young man what 'tan by him say, ' Hi ! yerry (listen), Mr.

Bickers,
If you no please wid de vittles, why not pitch in to de liquors ? '
Him say, ' me frien', I tink you is right, so if you get any good

old swizzle,
I will pitch in to de grog, fill me skin, and den I '11 mizzle.' "

Long before the House of Assembly had decreed
its own dissolution, the fortunes of Jamaica, and

ST. JAGO DE LA VEGA. 49

with them those of Spanish Town, had collapsed.
Emancipation, and the abolition of the monopoly on
sugar, had ruined the planters. The old families
were absentees. Their properties, left to be managed
by attorneys, had been squatted upon, and were in
the hands of negroes. The House of Eepresentatives
had become an " unutterable abomination ; " and
when the disturbances of 1865 ensued, the Assembly,
feeling itself powerless, laid down its nominal autho-
rity, and Jamaica became a Crown colony. Seven
years only have elapsed, but it is now a thing of the
past as much as if it had expired centuries ago. The
few who remain of the old turbulent spirits have
sunk into quiet respectability. Let us hope that
renewed prosperity to the island' and a bright and
glorious history may be the results of " The New
Constitution."

THE AMENITIES OF TROPICAL TRAVEL.

Travelling in Jamaica has its pleasures : when
has travelling not % But for a country inhabited by-
English men and women, and which deems its pro-
gress in civilisation quite abreast of the day, it has
more disagreeables than are creditable to it. In the
first place, it must all be done by carriage. There
is a short line of railway, it is true, between King-
ston and Old Harbour in St. Dorothy's, of which we
shall have more to say anon j but that takes you no
more than twenty-six miles on your tour round the
island, and occupies three and a half hours in doing so.
" Travelling fatiguing in this country ! " said a Creole
lady to me ; " nonsense ; you don't require to ride.
You have a buggy and horses. What more do you
want 1" But we do want a little more, madam. Pro-
gression at the rate of seven or eight miles an hour
is somewhat slow in these advanced days. Sitting
in a buggy for six or seven hours is apt to make a man
feel cramped and sore at the end of the day. Horses
are liable to knock up — Jamaica horses in particular.
The sun is rather hot in this climate, too. And
your negro driver ! Well, there is such a thing as
bouquet oVAfrique /

THE AMENITIES OF TROPICAL TRAVEL. 51

There are a few peculiarities in Jamaica travelling,
too, which we may as well mention here. One of
these is the number of rivers you have to cross in
the eastern, and the number of hills you have to
climb in the western, district of the island. In fine
weather, and with horses accustomed to the work, a
fording or two in the course of a journey is rather
a welcome interlude than otherwise. Picturesque
groups will occasionally cheer the traveller's eye.
Women " kirtled 'boon the knee " washing clothes
in the stream, or beetling them on large stones by
the water-side ; or a " walk-foot buckra " resting
under a tree ; or a clump of chattering negroes and
negresses discussing all the little gossip of the neigh-
bourhood ; for " de ribber " is the source of all the
scandal, and the generator of all the petty squabbles
of the district. But this species of amusement be-
comes a little wearisome when, as we occasionally
found, there were thirty or forty such streams to be
crossed in the long day's march. The steepness and
ruggedness of the roads is another disagreeable pecu-
liarity of travelling in Jamaica. Many of the roads,
in the hill districts of the island particularly, are
improperly laid, or rather remain in the old hog-
tracks when they were settled by the early colonists
of the island. The old maxim, that " where a hog
could walk a horse could walk," is only now begin-
ning to be repudiated by even professional surveyors.
It was always a matter of astonishment to me how
so few really serious accidents occurred on these, in
many cases, dangerous roads. One was constantly

52 THE AMENITIES OF

meeting with drays at their narrowest parts ; or,
going sharply round a corner, you found yourself
suddenly faced by a wain, with a spell of twelve or
sixteen oxen attached, full of hogsheads of sugar,
drawn right across the road ; or an ass laden with
panniers would start out of " the bush " just where
the path wound along the side of a deep gully, into
which it would have been certain destruction to have
been thrown. And if such accidents were providen-
tially rare, this was in no wise attributable either to
the carefulness of the draymen, or the intelligence
of the animals they drove.

Inns in the rural districts of Jamaica there are none.
But in most of the towns and villages are to be found
taverns, where accommodation for the night can be
procured. There is a strong family resemblance
amongst all the country lodging-houses. Your land-
lady is generally some old brown woman, the " house-
keeper " or wife of its late proprietor. On the walls of
the sorry sitting-room are suspended relics of its former
occupant — his miniature, done in the days of his
prosperity, or his masonic diploma, or his riding-whip
and planter's hat, or the blunderbuss he shouldered
when he served with the militia. In your bedroom
you will find a gigantic mahogany four-post bed, so
high that on retiring for the night the assistance of
a chair will be required ; the pillow and mattresses
moth-eaten; the coverlet a mass of gaudy-coloured
flowers of dubious cleanliness; and the mosquito
curtains bearing evident traces of never having been
loosened for years. As the evening advances, an

TROPICAL TRAVEL. 53

evil-smelling kerosene lamp will be placed on tfa
table, which will speedily be covered with myriads
of winged ants, moths, and other creatures attracted
by the light and the glare. And, in the course of a
couple of hours after your arrival, you will sit down
to a dinner, of which the pike de resistance will be a
sinewy fowl, not steeped in Falernian, alas! but
floating in liquid grease, coloured a brilliant orange
with " annatto" (Bixa orellana), and highly seasoned
with " Scotch bonnets," or some other of the many
varieties of the " country peppers " (Capsicum). Flank-
ing this will be a leathery boil of salt pork, all fat
and rind, a green plantain roasted in the ashes, and
a dish of yams or cocoas. Creole cookery, always
bad, seems to culminate in .such houses as these.
But if the traveller can put up with bad food, extor-
tionate charges, and a room which probably is not
weather-tight, he will be treated with a kindness
which, though inclined to slip into familiarity, is
the very essence of hospitality, and he will gain an
insight into the ways of a class of persons who are
fast dying out. Occasionally he may come across a
rare curiosity in these " old time" taverns. Per-
haps a grotesque picture of the great earthquake at
Port Eoyal in 1692, or a half-obliterated oil paint-
ing of Adam and Eve in the garden of Eden, or a
musical box, or some "grandmother's" china. Old
customs and usages seem to hang about their musty
walls. He need not be surprised if his "early
coffee" is ground between two stones — a custom
once universal throughout the island, and which is

54 THE AMENITIES OF

said to preserve the aroma of the berry better than
when it is prepared by the mill. But if the travel-
ler values a " cool bed" and clean sheets, he should
eschew the deceitful allurements of the tavern and
throw himself upon the hospitality of the nearest
private house. If he is provided with letters of
introduction, so much the better; but they are
hardly needed to insure him a hearty welcome.
Hospitality in Jamaica is a tradition which the
poorest planter prides himself in preserving invio-
late. Of course, there are planters and planters.
In some houses he will find himself surrounded
with all the comfort and refinement of an English
country house. In others his fare will be even
rougher than that of the tavern. "Beef" soup,
with the meat of which it has been cooked served
on a plate beside the tureen, a "surprised" fowl
knocked down as his buggy entered the gates, a
dish of " Halifax mutton," as the planters jokingly
call salt fish, and a coarse mass of sodden and over-
baked "cow meat" — the whole washed down with
copious libations of bad rum and brackish water —
will probably form his repast. After dinner, the
servant, as likely as not an illegitimate daughter of
his host, with bare feet, and the universal bandana
on her head, will hand him on a soup-plate the
freshly picked prickles of an orange tree for tooth-
picks ; and then island-made cigars will be intro-
duced, which he will be shown how to light from a
piece of live wood-coal, brought in by the same neat-
handed Phyllis, stuck on the point of a fork. A

TROPICAL TRAVEL. 55

breakfast cupful of black coffee, sweetened with
brown sugar, and another " long drink" of rum and
water will complete the evening's entertainment.
But whatever that entertainment has been, the guest
has ungrudgingly received the best his host has had
to supply, and he would be a churl indeed who did
not accept that hospitality in the spirit in which it
was offered.

The island of Jamaica is 150 miles long by 55 broad,
and contains about 4,000,000 of acres. It is inter-
sected by several chains of mountains, reaching in
places an altitude of between 7000 and 8000 feet,
generally preserving a range from east to west, and
all bearing traces of igneous formation.

These mountain chains may be roughly said to
divide the island into two halves, called respectively
the North side and the South side. Extensive and
widespread plains, lagoons and marshes, prevail on
the South side of the island; whilst the North is
distinguished by the number of its streams and
rivers, the wild grandeur of the beds of its moun-
tain torrents, and the rugged character of its cliffs
and bays.

The climate of Jamaica, on account of the varied
altitude of its surface, differs greatly throughout the
island. The North side is on the whole more salu-
brious than the South. In the plains and in the
large towns the heat is intense ; in the mountain
districts the temperature occasionally sinks as low
as 60° and 50°.

So little does the temperature vary throughout

56 THE AMENITIES OF

the year, that the traveller may traverse the island
at any time, with equal ease and comfort, except
during the vernal and autumnal rains in May and
October.

The advent of " the seasons," as they are called, is
to the experienced eye readily foretold by the in-
creased numbers of fire-flies and mosquitoes, which
seem "to smell the rain afar off;" and by the
appearance in the sky, often some time before, of
light, cirrus clouds, which the negroes not inaptly
nor unpoetically denominate " rain-seeds." " The
sky grows dense with visible vapours for some days
before the showers fall. As the clouds gather, the
coruscations of lightning become more constant
and vivid at nightfall. The rains then set in every
day, and continue for a succession of days, falling at
regular periods in the twenty-four hours. The
vernal showers descend amid lightning and thun-
der; and those of the autumn come with heavy
gusts of wind and storms. In the mountains the
rains are earlier and heavier than in the lowland
country." ■

The floods during the spring "seasons" of 1868
will long be remembered in Jamaica on account of
the damage done.

Many if not most of the river courses in the
island are the result of volcanic action, the clefts and
rents formed in the earth during its various up-
heavals ere it finally settled down into its present

1 Introductory Remarks prefixed to Catalogue of Articles Ex-
hibited by the Jamaica Society of Arts, 19th February 1855, p. 27.

TROPICAL TRAVEL. 57

features. Some of these, like the Rio Minho in
Clarendon, which goes by the name of the Dry River,
you can ordinarily cross without wetting your feet.
But during the "seasons" the rains in the mountains
u bring the gullies down" as it is called, and the dry
water-courses become raging torrents, overflowing
their banks and spreading a turbid sheet of wholesale
ruin and desolation over the plains. Eoads are
broken up and laid bare to their very foundations ;
houses and bridges washed away ; horses and cattle
drowned while feeding in the pastures ; fields of
corn and cane —

Sata laeta bovumque labores —
uprooted.

In 1869 no spring rains made their appearance at
all, and a drought almost as calamitous as the sea-
sons of the year before set in. But in 1870 the
■ imbriferum ver " again brought back, in sugar plant-
ers' phrase, " splendid seasons," almost as disastrous
in their effects as those of 1868. In the parish of
Hanover, between Lucea and Green Island, all the
bridges were swept away, and 150 acres of mountain
land came down with a run. In Westmoreland
several estates were flooded, and at Knockalva, in
the parish of St. James, the accumulation of water was
said to be sufficient to float a frigate. At Grange Hill
in Hanover a severe landslip took place, and a house
which stood on the top of a hill was thrown down
completely. " Two large trees," said an eye-witness
of the scene, " which formerly grew near the top of
the hill, slid down the slope evidently without let or

58 THE AMENITIES OF TROPICAL TRAVEL.

hindrance. Growing within a few feet of each other,
they still hold the same position. Having descended
some sixty or seventy feet, they have been arrested
in their course, and now remain erect upright, in the
same relative position to each other in which they
grew, and which they have held for the last century.
Except for the wreck of mud, earth, stones, puddles
of water, bushes, broken branches, etc., with which
they are surrounded, you would not believe they had
ever been moved."1

1 From an interesting letter in Gall's West India News Letter,
No. 247, June 9, 1870.

VI.

THE GRAND SQUARE.

We left Spanish Town by the early train for Old
Harbour — the Esquivilla of the Spaniards — which
we reached about nine o'clock. A more uncomfort-
able journey than these few miles of railway travel-
ling it was never our lot to endure. We seemed to
be in actual danger every minute. The train swung
from side to side, jolted up and down, bumped its
carriages together, careless alike of engineman or
driver, acting apparently upon the dictates of its
own irresponsible caprice. It would stop, perhaps,
to utter piercing shrieks from its whistle — a cow
was crossing the line — or, after a sudden explosion
of pea-soup coloured smoke, a shower of live wood
sparks would penetrate into the carriage, burning
holes in our garments and occasionally alighting
in our eyes. What with stopping for cows, and
stopping to water, with slackening speed when the
rails were broke, and with going at a snail's pace
over some badly built embankment, it took us two
hours to travel twelve miles — two hours of actual
physical misery, unalienated by even ordinarily com-
fortable carriages, and without the slightest protec-
tion from the glaring morning sun.

GO THE GRAND SQUARE.

There was little in the scenery to divert our
attention from the disagreeables of our journey. We
passed through Bushy Park Estates, through high
fields of sugar-canes — surely the most unbeautiful
sight, except of course to a planter, which nature
has to bestow.

We were struck with the profuse growth of the
convolvuli on the low marsh lands between that
place and Old Harbour. They trailed over the
railway fence ; they crept over the ground ; they
climbed up trees; they made unto themselves arbours
of every broken branch and of every forked tree-
limb. There was nothing beautiful but much that
was depressing in this wild, rank, lavish vegetation.
One longed for a little English energy to cut away
this life-destroying " bush," to clear the lines and
open the landscape. Even our English fields,

" All tied up with hedges, nosegay-like,"

we felt were better than this unkempt, far from
grand, luxuriance.

We stopped to breakfast at a little cottage tavern
opposite the railway station. It was kept by an
Englishman, who told us he had recently been so
cruelly oppressed by the law, in passing through the
insolvent court, that he could afford us but sorry ac-
commodation. He had not hitherto been patronized,
he said. His efforts at tavern-keeping, like every-
thing else he had put his hand to, had been unsuc-
cessful. He had been forty years in Jamaica, and
had striven always to deal honestly with the Creoles,

THE GRAND SQUARE. 61

— a dreadful mistake, he added bitterly, as he had
found to his cost.

There was, certainly, a great absence of furniture
about the establishment. But, en revanche, the hall
boasted a marvellous work of art — a painting on
canvas of the arms of Jamaica, the noble production
of a black artist. There they stood as large as life,
the two naked female savages, with leering eyes and
feather petticoats, and gemmed and jewelled legs,
arms, hands, and feet. One grasped bow and arrow;
the other carried a pine-apple. Above their heads
stood an alligator with tail erect, a characteristic
grin on his jolly countenance, and an unmistakably
human eye. At the foot of the picture was the
motto, " Indus uterque serviet uni," in blue letters
on a white ground ; and below this in ornamental
characters an inch in height was the inscription,

" W. Beckford.
Native Talent."

From Old Harbour we made a flying visit to the
" Grand Square," as Vere with its rich quadrilateral
of sugar estates is called by the planters.

The road was excellent all the way, but then it
was early spring, and there were as yet no traces of
" the seasons." The roads in Jamaica, it must be
confessed, are but fine-weather roads. The sun is
the best way-warden.

We slept at the Alley, a fair specimen of the
ordinary and very uninteresting West Indian village.
There was a court-house and a market-place, a lock-
up like a mosque in miniature, and a quaint brick-

62 THE GRAND SQUARE.

built church with a square tower and a slated roof,
and a most orthodox-looking weathercock. The
churchyard was overgrown with grass and weeds,
like almost every other churchyard I ever saw in
Jamaica. The Creoles have not yet learned to re-
spect their dead. But it contained three magnificent
ceibas, one of which at least, in its gigantic bulk, in
the depth of its buttresses, and the enormous length
of its branches, far surpassed the famous cotton-tree
on the Spanish Town road. "We essayed a rough
measurement of this old forest giant, and found him
to measure no less than eighty feet round the base.
The height of the trunk before it split off into
branches was between twenty-five and thirty feet.
One of its limbs, decorated with half-a-dozen goitres
like ants' nests, seemed to reach over half the church-
yard, and in the deep embayments of its branches
we found some combs of wild honey of pearly
whiteness.

Thence turning our horses' heads northwards we
arrived late in the evening at the pretty village of
Chapelton, among the Clarendon hills.

How can we describe the unutterably bare and
barren character of the scenery between the Alley
and Four Paths, our half-way station on the road
to Chapelton?

Dusty roads, bordered with stunted logwood-trees,
for miles ; then dusty roads without the logwood-
trees ; then a dry river-course full of rough stones,
which broke our buggy springs and delayed us an hour
to have them tied up with ropes and branches; then

THE GRAND SQUARE. 63

more dusty roads and logwood-trees, and then dusty
roads without logwood-trees as before. Not a bird
to be seen, not a butterfly on the wing ; not a bit of
colour, except a stray orchid or two, to break the
drear monotony of the landscape.

I shall never forget the exuberant delight with
which we caught sight of a brilliant bunch of Brough-
tonia sanguined on a dusty logwood-tree in the course
of our day's journey. Its rich magenta blossoms
were a positive godsend to the eye, fatigued by per-
petual sombre greys and washed-out greens. Besides,
we had made a discovery in natural history. "We had
distinctly disproved Gosse's statement that the log-
wood was the only tree on which orchids did not grow.

" Dem bush no grow a' logwood tree ! " said
Bob. " Cho ! de nigger people call dem trash " (and
he pointed to our treasures), " noting but logwood
bush!"

We rested at Four Paths till the sun had turned,
then started in the cool of the evening for Chapelton.
Here we had plenty to occupy and delight us. The
air was filled as with a mist with the floating flakes
of the " down " tree. Eare ferns grew on the banks;
bright butterflies flitted across the path. If we had
followed our inclination and taken out our butterfly
nets, we should probably have been there till the fol-
lowing day. As it was, the fireflies had lighted their
golden lamps, tree frogs were croaking, crickets and
grasshoppers chirping, and the thousand and one
voices of the night were in full melody by the time
we reached our destination.

64 THE GRAND SQUARE.

We found Chapelton to be a cheerful, well-to-do-
in-a-humble-way townlet, standing on the top of a
hill and surrounded with an amphitheatre of verdure-
covered mountains. There was an hospital for the
coolie labourers on the various estates in the neigh-
bourhood ; a court-house clean and freshly painted ; a
substantially built church, whose harmonium, it must
be confessed, produced most execrable music ; one or
two good stores, which looked as if they did a little
— not very much — business ; and some handsome
flowering trees carefully railed in.

Beside the court-house stood a splendid Spathodea
in full blossom. The top of the tree was a brilliant
crown of rosy colour, surmounting a mass of dense
foliage, through which the yellow sunlight played,
lighting up its under surface and bronzing its dull
grey branches.

I carry away with me two agreeable reminiscences
of Chapelton : for here, was I not introduced to
"pepper-pot" and mountain mullet1? Not the
Demerara pepper-pot with its evil-smelling and still
more evil-tasting Cassareep sauce and its hereditary
pipkin; but a rich succulent potage, a very Meg
Merrilees broth of pork and beef and fowl, ochroes
and calaloo (the West Indian spinach), peppers, cray-
fish and negro yam ; in colour a dark green, with
the scarlet prawns appearing through the chaotic
mass not unpicturesquely. Not to be despised was
the little glass of punch that followed it ; lime juice
and sugar, rum and water carefully compounded
after the old Creole receipt :

THE GRAND SQUARE. 65

" One of sour and three of sweet,
Four of strong and four of weak."

With the negroes, pepper-pot is a compound of
the most heterogeneous description. Prawns or cray-
fish of some kind are de rigueur, but bamboo tops,
cotton-tree tips, cabbage, pimpernel, pulse, and even
the buds of the night-blowing cereus, occasionally
find a place in its concoction.

" You English beat us in our cooking generally,"
said a Creole friend to me, as we sat in judgment
over our pepper-pot ; " but you can't come up to us
in your soups. Nasty watery stuff! Nothing but
hot water coloured with onions and some little chips
of carrot floating about in the tureen. Now this is
what I call a good soup — something rich and sub-
stantial. Birch's turtle-soup is very fair, and his
hot jelly and brandy is grateful enough on a cold
day. But he '11 require to come out to Jamaica if he
wishes to learn to make soup to perfection ! "

We found this delusion prevalent throughout all
the country. Nothing could persuade a Creole that
his soups, his minces and his stews, were not the
ne plus ultra of excellence in cookery. There was a
sufficiency of richness in good sooth. Salt butter
was imparted with no grudging hand. Peppers and
annatto were not stinted. The colouring was bril-
liant and the pungency intense. But where had all
the flavour gone %

As for the little mountain mullet, it well deserves
its fame, as the delicatest fish that swims in Jamaica
rivers. But it must be eaten the moment it is taken

66 THE GRAND SQUARE.

out of the water. Then, wrapped in plantain leaves,
or better still in note-paper, and lightly heated on a
gridiron over a clear wood fire, it forms, in Brillat
Savarin's phrase, a veritable bocca di Cardinale.

" The largest and the best I ever tasted," said one
of our gourmand friends, " weighed a pound and a
half in weight, and had green fat and yellow fat,
just like a turtle."

VII.

TO THE BULLHEAD.

We had but one excursion from Chapelton, and
that was to the Bullhead, the centre of the island.
Following the wholesome Creole practice, we made
an early start of it.

There is something exquisitely beautiful in the
tropical morning. Up to seven or eight o'clock the
climate is delicious. The sea breeze has not risen
yet. The night coolness has not yet been dissipated
by the fierce meridian sun. The sky is of a pearly
colour, white at the horizon, gently shading off into
blue as it ascends. You look out of your window
at a crooked cocoa-nut palm, or a mass of thick
foliage or a glittering waveless sea. Nothing stirs.
Not a sound is heard beyond the occasional crow of
a cock, or the bark of a dog, or the full rich notes of
a mocking-bird, or a jumping dick from a neigh-
bouring tree. Jamaica for the time seems a para-
dise, the incarnation of tropical beauty, the thing
you have dreamed about whilst sitting over your
fire in smoky London. But only wait one hour
when the sun begins to assert its power, and man's
voice begins to make itself heard, and buggies to
rattle over the streets, and this bustling, sweltering

68 TO THE BULLHEAD.

town, or the gossiping indolent village awakens into
life. Then, indeed, life is felt to be a burden, and
the thoughts turn for relief to winter days and sun-
less skies, and cheery cold frosty mornings.

A drive of about half-an-hour brought us to the
banks of the Rio Minho meandering out and in
through the cane-pieces, and bordered with clumps of
wild canes twenty-five or thirty feet high, their long
arrow-shaped flowers shooting up sometimes six or
ten feet into the air. The ground hereabouts is a
dead level, broken only by the windings of the river,
which in a half-hour's drive we crossed some four or
five times. Passing Savoy estate we came down
upon Morgans, now a deserted sugar plantation,
with its once handsome many-arched aqueduct tum-
bling to pieces and blocking up the road with frag-
ments of broken masonry ; erst one of the most
prosperous estates in Jamaica in the good old days
of slavery.

Perhaps of all the parishes in the island Claren-
don can show the greatest number of thrown-up
sugar estates. " I can remember fifty-two working
plantations," said a jolly old gentleman of sixty to
me, " when I was a boy ; " and a clergyman who
had been thirty years in the parish could recollect
as many as thirty-seven which had been abandoned
in his time. " I do not think," says Sewell,1 " that
five miles can be travelled on any road in Jamaica,
without seeing one deserted estate at the very least."
In the once flourishing parish of St. Thomas-ye-East,

1 Ordeal of Free Labour in the British West Indies, p. 186.

TO THE BULLHEAD.

69

for example, out of forty-four estates in cultivation
in 1842, twenty are still in existence. In Portland
matters are still worse, and although some parishes
have suffered more than others the rule holds good
throughout the whole island. " It was not always
so," said a planter's friend. " It was the Saints that
ruined us — St. "Wilberforce, St. Macaulay, and their
following. Well, I bear them no malice, but would
they could only see now the desolation they have
produced!" On the other hand, the number of
small sugar-mills amongst the peasantry has largely
increased within the last few years.

In Clarendon they have quite taken the place of
the old estates.

A recent return has shown a total of 5415 through-
out the island, distributed as follows : —

Westmoreland,

684

Clarendon,

611

St. Ann's,

611

St. Elizabeth's,

486

St. Catherine's,

657

Manchester,

456

St. Andrew's,

435

Hanover,

364

St. Thomas,

295

St. Mary,

278

Trelawny,

271

Portland,

256

St. James,

411

5415

Of this total number 5174 are moved by horse-
power, and only 240 dependent on manual labour.

70 TO THE BULLHEAD.

But they are attended with great danger, and Dr.
Croskery, a well-known medical man in Clarendon,
has shown that in spring, when the mills are " about,"
the number of accidents which happen to the persons
engaged in working them is so large as to call for
legislation on the subject. The construction of these
mills is of the most rudimentary description. They
consist of three horizontal rollers, between the first
and second of which the canes are inserted by the
"feeders," who are for the most part women and
children. The canes as they revolve round the
central cylinders, have then to be pushed by the
hands of the feeders between the second and third
rollers, and as these are entirely unprotected, it
follows that the legs and the arms of the little
feeders are almost as often caught as the canes. If
a feeding-board was set up before the rollers, and a
"dumb turner" or semi-cylindrical piece of wood
placed at the back of the central cylinder to assist
the entrance of the canes between the two last
rollers, the danger from this cause would be minim-
ized. As it is, there is no doubt that the reckless
danger to life and limb caused by those peasant
mills should be put a stop to in some way or an-
other.

Oddly enough, that portion of upper Clarendon, in
which all the estates are situated, is the most pictur-
esque part of the whole parish. In the other parts
of the island the rule is exactly the converse. But
all this district looks as if it had been given back to
nature. Man has nothing more to do with it. He

TO THE BULLHEAD. 71

has freely and voluntarily relinquished it. He has
cast it aside as worthless. Priceless though the
pearl is, he has flung it from him for any passer-by
to pick up. Take the roads for instance. Green
sward carpets them, or they are like the rocky chan-
nels of rivers, — so thickly are they covered with the
stones which the rains of years have washed down
from the mountain sides. And as for the mud
which lies on them in places — black rich mud, full
of decayed vegetation — it was a couple of feet deep
in more than one part of the road. " De putta-putta
nasty ebery ting up," said Bob ; and there was no
gainsaying his observation.

But the vegetation would have delighted a botan-
ist. Bright begonias, clumps of wild ginger, Macca-
fat palms, — surely the most graceful of all that grace-
ful tribe, with their stems covered thick with rare
ferns — bamboos shading the river-posts, green moss
mantling the stones, and convolvuli shrouding the
star-apple trees, and concealing the loftiest monarchs
of the forest with an apron of greenery. Nude
women and girls were washing clothes in the stream.
The little black " picknies" gambolled about amongst
their mammies and sisters, equally indifferent with
them to the presence of strangers. Sometimes a
woman, in an excessive fit of modesty, would take
her handkerchief from her head and cover her bosom.
But this, it must be confessed, was a rare case. One
felt as if he ought to apologize to these children of
nature for bringing civilisation, in the shape of a
buggy and horses, amongst their sylvan retreats. It

72 TO THE BULLHEAD.

was their freehold. What had the white man to do
there ! With his puggree and his umbrella he was
as much an anachronism there as one of these sable
undraped maidens would be in Bond Street.

Then we came upon a little negro village, which
seemed formed as if to illustrate the old Scotch say-
ing, " the clartier the cosier." It was very clarty,
and it looked very cosy. There was a rum shop, of
course, with half-a-dozen bottles of ale on the shelves.
But there were no buyers and no sellers so far as we
could see.

These country rum or grog shops, as they are
called, are, we fear, productive of much evil to these
little rural communities. The annual license pay-
able for each is £10, a sum certainly not to be
repaid by the rum-shop keeper's legitimate profits
upon " quattie drinks," and three-penny glasses of
ale or porter. Many of them, in consequence, bear
a very bad name, and are shrewdly suspected to be
the depot of much of the rum stolen annually from
the estates. That they are, one and all, gambling
hells, there is no doubt — for all their deceptive
innocence of appearance. They are the rendezvous
of all the loafers of the district. Draymen, labourers,
petty shopkeepers, — you will see them almost at
every hour of the day lounging over the counter, or
playing " nine-holes " before the door. Now and
then, especially during the Christmas holidays, the
rum-shop keeper, with a view of bringing customers
to his establishment, will give a dance to all the
negroes in the country-side, and the scenes of de-

TO THE BULLHEAD. 73

bauchery that then ensue are almost incredible in
their abomination.

Then came another stretch of river. On a bank
of pebbles in the middle of the stream, an old, old
woman, with a long staff in her hand to support her
feeble frame, was drying thin slices of plantain on
the sun-baked stones preparatory to pounding them
into flour (called conquintay) for porridge. By the
road-side pine-apples grew wild, and in one or two
of the yards were trees of chocolate (Theobroma cacao),
with their rough magenta-coloured pods growing out
from their stems.

At Orange River, where we stopped on the way,
we made the acquaintance of a worthy clergyman,
who welcomed us with true Jamaica heartiness. He
was a rare example of what energy and perseverance
could do. He had bought the property on which he
resided for an old song, and here, after many years'
preparation for the undertaking, he was resuscitating
in a humble way truly, but still resuscitating — the
thrown-up sugar estate. Old boilers, which he had
found buried under planks and rubbish, were being
brought out and fixed up in their places. The mag-
nificent old water-wheel, thirty-three feet high, had
been patched up and put in order, the cracked and
broken gutters cleaned out and mended. The old
man was full of his undertaking. He showed us
over all his works : his boiling-house with his tache,
and his second tache, his "grand copper" and his
cooling pan ; his cooper's shop, with its heaps of old
barrels carefully collected " from time " to hold his

74 TO THE BULLHEAD.

then ungrown sugar. Hopefully and proudly he
pointed to his cane-fields. Out of these four or five
acres he expected to make a hundred barrels, or
twelve and a half hogsheads of sugar, which, at the
rate of £2 per barrel, would bring him £120 in
Kingston. Each plant produced no less than five
roots of canes, and from each of these five roots he
would obtain two quarts of liquor. The cultiva-
tion of his few poor fields — mea jpaupera regna —
had cost him £20; and he had paid £60 more
to rig up the old mill, to "put it about," as he
phrased it ; and now, after years of preparation and
scraping and saving to get the money together, if all
went well, he hoped to make a decent competence
for his old age. Next year he would have twenty-
five acres more under cultivation, the following year
double that quantity ; and such was the fertility of
the soil, that he had seen ratoons1 out of it seven
years' old, and after that lapse of time it only re-
quired to be turned over to be as good as ever. In
addition to his cares as a planter, he was the doctor,
parson, and deputy-coroner in all the mountain-
side ; and if there was a man who rose early and
worked late, and earned his bread by the toil of his
hands and the sweat of his brow, it was this shrewd,
energetic, unpolished, rough, honest Norfolk mis-
sionary.

Not the least interesting part of his conversation
was his account of the revival meetings which a few

1 Ratoons, a corruption of the Spanish word brotones, are suckers
or sprouts that spring from the roots of canes that have previously
been cut down.

TO THE BULLHEAD. 75

years ago took place amongst the negroes of his dis-
trict. For seven days and seven nights the people
would not leave the chapel. Keligious frenzy seized
all classes. Some fed on grass ; others crawled on
all-fours like beasts ; others went about prophesying
that Obeah was hidden under the threshold of the
church. Immorality, under such circumstances, was
much more rife than religion.

The hill called the Bullhead is one of the Claren-
don range, and rises to the height of 3140 feet
above the level of the sea. From its peculiar out-
line it forms a well-known landmark to sailors ; but
its chief interest is derived from the fact that it is
almost if not quite the central point of the island,
whilst it commands one of the most extensive moun-
tain views obtainable in Jamaica.

At first the ascent was easy enough. Our sure-
footed mules carried us safely and steadily over the
rugged mountain roads ; whilst bamboos and lance-
wood and foliage of all descriptions shaded our path
and protected us from the fierce noonday sun.

" Good morning, father! " said Bob, who was of the
party, to an old man whom we met at a shady corner
of the road, just where a rope-fall of trickling water
lent a cool and drowsy charm to the scene.

" Good morning, sa ; hope you is bery well %"

" So so, bad enough," was the indefinite but char-
acteristic reply, " but no so wusser " (worse).

Every step we took was leading us further and
further away from civilisation. Clumps of the silver
fern began to show themselves on the banks, and

76 TO THE BULLHEAD.

we knew from this that we had reached a consider-
able elevation. Then stray specimens of the golden
fern appeared, and we saw several varieties of the
superb vine or parasitic ferns creeping over bush
and shrub, and hanging in long elegant garlands to
the ground. At times a fresh cold breeze came
sweeping over the path, and now and then came the
" cling-cling " of a black-bird, or the " sweet, sweet,
sweet to-too " of the fly-catcher (vires Noveboracensis).
Very quaint and very amusing are some of the
negro's interpretations of the songs of the birds —

" liquidas avium voces " —

and the sounds of external nature.

The jabbering crow (Corvus Jamaicensis), a wise
and learned bird, in harsh guttural tones, gabbles

forth

" Walk fast crab, do buckra work,
Cutacoo l better than wallet."

" Tom Paine, Tom Paine ! " whistles out the black
and golden banana bird (Icterus leucopteryx) ; " Going
awa-a-y ! " cries the Savanna black-bird (Crotophaga
ani) ; " Gi' me a bit," says the night or mosquito
hawk (Chordeiles Virginianus) ; and the white- wing
dove (Turtur leucopteryx), in protracted and moaning
tones, announces that " Since poor Gilpin die, cow-
head spoil!" Vain of her plumage the female of
the blue pigeon (Columba rufina) cries

" Sally coat blue,
Sally coat, true blue ! "

whilst the male replies, " For true ; for true, for
1 A small flat hand-basket.

TO THE BULLHEAD. 77

true! " The quail (Ortyx Virginianus), like a common
crier, heralds the coming of the early spring with
the cry of " Green peas sweet ! " or " Red peas in, red
peas in ! " a kind of pulse in which he much delights.
The hen-turkey, from which, it is said,1 our European
domestic bird is derived, in melancholy accents com-
plains, " We poor black people hab bery bad times;"
and the male, in a fierce gobble, counsels her, " Take
heart, take heart, take heart, take heart!"

The bull lowing in the meadow has also his griev-
ances to relate : " Man hab beard, goat hab beard,
I hab none ; what a shame, what a shame, what a
shame ! "

The large speckled frog of the morass has a very
bad name among the negroes. A book-keeper on
one of the large estates told me how on one occasion
he overheard a conversation on the subject amongst
a group of negroes, who were taking their chocolata
(breakfast) under a tree, after their morning labours
in the field.

" It bery true," said one, " dat Coolie man bring
de cholera into de country."

" Cho ! " said the head man of the gang, with an
impatient grunt, "it 'tan too 'tupid! (stupid). How
Coolie man can bring cholera ? Do you no know
Goramighty send it? But I tell you dis fe true.
Dem frog bring de small-pox ya (here). You no see
how dem 'tan?" he asked, appealing to his auditors.
" Dem no hab mark on deir back ob de small-pox
dey bring from dem own country?"

1 Gosse, Birds of Jamaica, p. 329. London, Van Voorst. 1847.
F

78 TO THE BULLHEAD.

The green lizard, again, is the true friend of the
negro, and will warn him of the approach of a snake,
when tired and weary he lies down to sleep under
a tree. Yet with all his love of nature, the negro
never makes pets. Cats, I have heard it said, he
dislikes, as the type and representation of the evil
one ; and the lean, ragged, half-starved dogs, with
ribs- protruding out of their flesh, that are sometimes
to be seen in the neighbourhood of negro huts, are
kept always for the sake of use, never as a source of
pleasure or amusement to himself or his family.

To animals he is often most savagely cruel. It is
no uncommon thing for a man who has a grudge
against another to catch his mule or his horse, and
after cutting out its tongue and filling the mouth
with leaves, to leave it to die in the most fearful
agony.

About 1240 feet below the Bullhead, and nearly
2000 above the sea, stands the missionary station of
Mount Carmel, a happy, primitive community, very
quaint in its simplicity. In the tumble-down cottage
once inhabited by the parson we found a dilapidated
harmonium and a broken magic lantern, which
showed at least some of the means by which he had
acquired his influence over his flock.

At this point we began to climb in right earnest j
and long before we reached the top, it was hard to
say whether our mules or ourselves were most done
up. We found the summit of the hill to be an
almost level plateau, covered with grass, and ground
orchids, and wild starch, and the lovely Bletia, and

TO THE BULLHEAD. 79

bearing in the midst of a little clump of trees a
mountain tarn, at the bottom of which, the negroes
say, a golden table lies concealed. The view was
magnificent. We could see over thirteen parishes.
There away to the east lay the grand range of the
Blue Mountains, with their celebrated peak, 7000
feet high, standing out against the sky. Before us
was a stretch of glittering sea. Looking towards
the west were the Manchester hills, and behind us
and to the northward were the cane-covered fields of
Trelawny and St. Ann's, — " the garden " of Jamaica.
Our toil had indeed been rewarded.

VIII.

BLACKS AND WHITES — A CONTRAST.

A man's estimate of the negro character varies
according to the length of time he spends among
them. The first year, his opinion of them is a high
one. He is amused by their merry faces, their
broad grins, their apparent good nature, their seem-
ing simplicity of character. He looks upon them
as happy children, for whom the song, and the dance,
and the church constitute the essentials of life. The
second year his ideas are somewhat modified. He
regards them as children still, but now as spoiled
children, who give a great deal of trouble ; and by
the third or fourth year he has begun to talk about
the " irrepressible nigger," and to speak of them in
very much the same language as the planters get the
credit of doing.

A surface polish of civilisation the negro can attain,
and is attaining ; but beyond this it seems doubtful
whether he can ever advance. Chassez le naturel,
il revient au galop. The native springs of civilisa-
tion, the quick working brain to conceive, the prompt
energy to execute, knowledge of other countries,
and of races besides his own, from which to gather

BLACKS AND WHITES — A CONTRAST. 81

ideas, are wanting to him. Without these, the
negro will ever remain a race apart. It is idle to
compare his character to that of any other peasantry
in the world. He forms a class by himself, anta-
gonistic to many, dissimilar to all. For the Jamaica
negro is the product of many different races, and of
many distinct tribes : —

" The Jaboos, the Whydahs, the Fantees,
The Congos, the Warees, the Ashantees,
The Quaquas, the Sonsees, the Boulahs,
The Pongos, the Naloos, the Foulahs."

The moral defects of the negro are those which he
entertains in common with all other barbarous races.
Chief amongst these is his propensity to petty acts
of theft, — a vice which prevails to its greatest extent
in the country district of the island. He steals
because he is too lazy to work. As he steals, so of
course he lies ; and, as a natural result, he has little
idea of the sanctity of an oath. Perjury is fright-
fully prevalent in the courts of law throughout the
island. The penalty attached to the taking of a
false oath is, in negro language, " belly swell an' him
die." But kissing your thumb, instead of your
Bible, placing a piece of silver money under your
tongue, or, if a male, being sworn with a handker-
chief bound round the head, will avert so dire a
result.

Devoted to sensual pleasure, the negro has little
respect for the marriage tie. Concubinage is a uni-
versal institution, and bears with it no disgrace.
The offspring of such connexions — " bye-children,"

82 BLACKS AND WHITES — A CONTRAST.

" out -children," or " love-children," as they are
called, — generally follow the mother. It is rare
that a father thinks himself bound even to provide
food for such children. He bears them no affection :
he does not recognise any claim they may have upon
him. If they lose themselves, and die in the woods,
he does not deem himself bound to go and bury
them. It is the woman's look-out, not his. Why
should he trouble himself with what does not con-
cern him !

It must be kept in view that a negro's thoughts,
and cares, and feelings are bounded by this world
alone. " It is almost impossible," said a worthy
clergyman to me, " to make him believe in a place
of eternal punishment." Death to the negro has no
terrors. He dies because his time has come. But
he dies, like a dog, without a regret and without a
pang, — confident that, if there is a heaven, he will
find admission there ; and that, if there is not, he
has finished his course, and drunk all that he will
ever be allowed to drink of the pleasures and pains
of life.

Fatalism is in itself a superstition, and the negro
is superstitious in the extreme. A'^belief in " duppies"
(ghosts) is universal. The spirits of the bad " walk,"
as the negroes call it, and after death revisit the
spots they have known on earth. They have their
favourite haunts too. One of these is the Salt
Ponds, near Spanish Town, a notable resort of the
buccaneers in the brave old piratical days. In the
country districts you will see the peasantry flocking

BLACKS AND WHITES — A CONTRAST. 83

aome from their grounds in troops as soon as it
begins to get dark ; and after sunset no one is to
be seen abroad. Nothing will tempt the negro to
go out of sight of the light burning in his hut on a
dark night. His fear peoples every bush and every
tree with ghostly forms. If your horses blow or
prick their ears when travelling at night ; if, in
passing through a lonely wood, you perceive the
odour of musk, ghosts are either beside you, or near
at hand ; if, in some desolate country region, you
notice the faint smell of cooking, the negroes say,
" it duppy pumpkin," — it is duppies preparing their
food ; if a rat bites you during sleep, if an owl
flaps its wings heavily, evil of a serious nature is
approaching ; if the wind has a " sough " in its tone,
it is the heralding of evil tidings ; if bats cross each
other diagonally in the crimson stream of sunset,
some powerful friend will shortly be at variance
with you ; and if you set a duppy at defiance, going
towards it in the endeavour to prove that the super-
natural appearance is caused by some undulation of
light, or by the shadow flickering on the curtain-
fold, illness of a dangerous or perhaps fatal nature
will surely follow.

A very mischievous ghost is that known by the
name of the " rolling calf," a spirit who haunts the city
by night with a flaming eye, trailing a long chain
behind him. To speak to, or to touch the chain of
a rolling calf will cause him to turn and rend you.
The only way of escape is to stick an open penknife
in the ground and run without looking behind you !

84 BLACKS AND WHITES — A CONTRAST.

What may be called the domestic superstitions of
the negroes are very numerous. A belief in the
evil eye is as common in Jamaica as it is in Egypt.
I have seen a woman come into the magistrates
court with a piece of pink ribbon tied on one arm
and a piece of blue on the other to ward off its
malign influence. It is unlucky to praise an infant
too much or to say that it closely resembles either its
father or mother. To carry a pepper in your pocket
will make you poor. To give a thing and take it
back will give you a stye in your eye ; and no negro
would kill the large black Annancy spider, for
some domestic misfortune would inevitably ensue.
" Trouble," says the proverb, " day da bush : An-
nancy bring him come da house."

Professedly a Christian it may be doubted whether
one negro in a thousand attaches a correct meaning
to even the most simple ordinances of religion. In
some districts of the island, indeed, these are tra-
vestied at midnight meetings held under leafy
booths erected for the purpose, which are carefully
concealed from the knowledge of the parish minister.
At these "singing meetings" a woman sanctifies the
bread and administers the elements. Hymns are
sung, words are spoken, mysterious rites are observed.
The worshippers grow more and more excited as the
fires burn out and the night grows old ; and the
meeting ends as might be expected in license and
debauchery.

Wakes, too, are fruitful causes of sin. These are
held on the first and ninth nights after death. A

BLACKS AND WHITES — A CONTRAST. 85

white cock is sacrificed over the grave to propitiate

the manes of the deceased ; and then ensues a feast

or " eating match," after which the mourners indulge

in such diversions as " Hide-and-seek," " Hot bran

well buttered," "Thread the needle," "Beg you little

water," and other boisterous games. Songs are sung

little mournful in their character; as an example

we may give the following : —

" Me len' him my canoe,
Him broke my paddle,
(Choncs.) John Joe, widdle waddle.

Me len' my fish-pot,

Him tief my net,

John Joe, widdle waddle.

Me len' him my harpoon,

Him tief my line,

John Joe, widdle waddle.

John Joe no hab
None hat 'pon him head.
John Joe, widdle waddle.

John Joe no hab

No shirt 'pon him back,

John Joe, widdle waddle.

If I catch John Joe
I will broke him neck,
John Joe, widdle waddle." l

Much the same sort of thing goes on at the meeting

which is held on the first anniversary of a death,

when his friends and neighbours assemble to build

the dead man's tomb. Before this can be done

it is necessary "to lay his spirit," and when "it

1 From " Tom Kittle's Wake," by Henry G. Murray, an interest-
ing and amusing brochure on- the manners and customs of Jamaica
a century ago. Kingston, R. Jordon, 1869.

86 BLACKS AND WHITES — A CONTRAST.

runs wild," as is not unfrequently the case, this
is sometimes not effected without difficulty. There
is something almost poetical in the negro custom of
burying their dead in the little yards attached to
their huts, underneath the coffee trees and the ban-
anas which they had worked at during their lives.
Unfortunately, so far as the negroes are concerned,
sentimental motives have nothing to do with the
custom.

To our English ideas the religion of the negro too
often verges upon the burlesque. The scenes that
occur at the native Baptist Chapels throughout the
island are almost blasphemous in their absurdity.
At a respectable dissenting chapel in Montego Bay,

Brother was called upon to offer up a morning

prayer. "Lord! me da pray," he began, "me da
pray ! me no know wa me da say : me head is like
a well chock-full of nutting ! "

"Hi! bredren, you see me now?" said a black
preacher standing erect in the little wooden pulpit.

" Yes, massa, we see you ! " was the muttered
response from his flock.

Suddenly disappearing behind the pulpit he called
out " Bredren ! you see me now !"

" No, massa, we no see you ! "

" Bery well, bredren," he continued, again appear-
ing to his congregation. "An' now my text dis
marning is * a little while an' ye see me, and again
a little while an' ye shall not see me' ! " and he
proceeded with his sermon.

The negro's powers of observation are strikingly

BLACKS AND WHITE — A CONTRAST. 87

acute although his inferences are hardly ever accu-
rate. In his similes he is often exceptionally happy.
Many of them are highly poetical. Thus, when he
wishes to describe anything as very light and worth-
less, he says, " It is like bamboo ashes." Very dirty
spectacles are " glasses in mourning for their grand-
mothers." A deceitful, doublefaced man is said to
resemble "an apothecary's knife," which cuts both
ways. A pompous boastful man is said to be " big
like a man-of-war captain." A determined person
is "Mr. Strong-eye :" a boisterous man "Mr. Strong-
mouth j " a person addicted to making biting speeches
" Mr. Goat-mouth." An ill-mannered man is a " hog-
market somebody." A knock-kneed person " has
one foot to lay the cloth, and the other to call the
company." " Big-eye" is said of any one who is
greedy or covetous; " hard eyes" of people who are
wilful and disobedient. " Handsome to pieces," that
is, handsome in every part of his body, is remarked
of an Adonis; "him favour a patoo" (he is like a
screech-owl), or "his face is like foofoo" (like the
cracks and wrinkles in a plate of dried corn-porridge)
— of an ugly one.

With his nominal conversion to Christianity, the
negro gave up the use of the old heathen names
which he was in the habit of bestowing upon his
children, just as by his emancipation he escaped
from the classical appellations with which masters
were wont to supply their slaves. Yet, in some of
the remote country districts the " old-time" names
are still to be found, and a Chloe, a Cupid or a

BLACKS AND WHITES — A CONTRAST.

Venus, is occasionally to be met with. The old
African names were fourteen in number, and were
given according to sex and the day of the week on
which the child was born. The manner in which
they were employed, with their general signification,
was as follows : —

Male.

Female.

Sunday . .

Quashie, cunning.

Quashiba, slender.

Monday. .

Cudjo, strong-headed.

Juba, clever.

Tuesday .

Cubbena, inventive.

Benie, handsome.

Wednesday

Quaco, bad luck.

Cooba, stout.

Thursday .

Qua, ugly.

Aba, strong physic.

Friday . .

Cuffie, hot-tempered.

Fiba, gentle.

Saturday .

Quamin, full of tricks.

Mimba, wild.

Like the Shetlanders, the negro seldom " boders "
with surnames. The Christian name of the father
becomes the nomen gentilicium of the son. Thus, the
son of William Roberts will be named Thomas
Williams. His son will become John Thomas, and
so on ad infinitum. The women delight in high-
sounding combinations for their daughters. " Con-
stantia Rupertia," or " Justina Adriana " are common
and much admired appellations.

IX.

COUNTRY LIFE IN JAMAICA.

Country life in Jamaica consists of three well-
marked varieties, depending upon locality and
climate. The inhabitants of the rural districts are
coffee-planters among the hills, penners (cattle-
farmers) in the interior parishes, and planters round
the seaboard. The negro of the country districts is
the true, unadulterated, and genuine Quashie. Put
him beside the Kingston negro, and the contrast is
as great as between the London cabby and the Lan-
cashire collier. His character is to a considerable
extent influenced by the products of the district in
which he lives. In the neighbourhood of the large
sugar estates the peasantry are often a debased and
demoralized class. In the coffee-producing districts,
on the other hand, they are, comparatively speaking,
industrious and deserving. There are few villages
in the country parts of Jamaica. The negroes live
in " districts " — each man in his own hut and on his
own little patch of land. His dwelling is a mere
mud hovel, or a rude framework of rotten timber
filled in with bricks, or stones. The floor is native
mud. Amongst the rafters, scorpions, centipedes,

90 COUNTRY LIFE IN JAMAICA.

and other insects abound. Outside, animal refuse is
stored in some hollow where liquid permanently
rests, as likely as not, to the windward of the dwell-
ing. The site is probably a hole in the ground — not
unfrequently a swamp several feet below the adjoin-
ing road. This wretched hovel is crowded with
males and females of all ages, not to speak of pigs,
fowls, goats, and dogs; and as the sexes have no
means of separation, the social consequences may be
easily imagined. The only labour which is cheer-
fully performed by the negro in Jamaica is that which
he bestows on his own " provision ground." Of
these " grounds " each negro has at least one, vary-
ing in extent from half an acre to two or three acres.
Out of this he supports himself and his family, pays
his taxes, and obtains his food. Like the " plant-a-
cruive " of the Shetland peasant, the negro's ground
is often at some distance from his home. It is
usually some piece of waste or " ruinate" land, which
he leases from year to year from a neighbouring pro-
prietor. A provision ground in full cultivation —
" when it a-bloom," as the negroes call it — is a very
picturesque sight indeed. Within a roughly-made
bamboo or timber fence rise long rows of yams,
twining their graceful leaves round poles eight, ten,
and twelve feet high. Between these spring lines of
Indian corn (maize), and broad-leafed cocoas (Cocolabia
esculenta, a coarse yam), and the ochro (Hibiscus
esculentus), with its delicate yellow flower. Pump-
kins trail over the ground. Knubbly cabbages raise
their bullet heads. Pease and pulse of all kinds —

COUNTRY LIFE IN JAMAICA. 91

the "red Miss Kelly" and the "Black Betty," the
" Cockle's increase " (not unlike Antibilious Pills in
appearance), and " Sorrow for poor " crowd up all the
available space. Clustering over an old orange tree,
which in process of time it will utterly destroy, is a
handsome cho-cho vine, whose pear-like fruit is one
of the most useful vegetables of the tropics ; and in
one corner is a little patch of cassava (Jatropha Mani-
hot) from which the negro gets his starch, his tapioca,
and his bread, and from whose poisonous root is ex-
tracted the well-known cassareep, the foundation of
almost all our sauces. The negro labourer on a penn
(cattle farm) or plantation invariably reserves Friday,
and sometimes Monday, in each week for labour in
his ground. He watches the progress of his " pro-
visions " with a careful eye through all their various
stages of " growth " (sprouting), " blossoming,"
"fitting," "fitness," and "ripeness." Still we are
afraid it is true that much of his labour in his field
consists of lying under a tree with a "junky"
(cutty) pipe in his mouth, indulging in Turk-like
keyf, and dreamily gloating over his rising
crops. The rent of a provision ground of one
acre is usually twenty shillings a year. With ordi-
nary labour an annual return of something like
£30 may be obtained. The food of the negro
chiefly consists of "bread kind" and "salt pro-
visions." The former embraces yams, plantains,
bananas, cocoas, bread-fruit, and sweet potatoes.
The latter includes salt pork, salt cod, ling, herring,
and mackerel. Vegetables are chiefly used as in-

92 COUNTRY LIFE IN JAMAICA.

gredients in pepper-pot. Stewed cat is said to be con-
sidered a dainty dish amongst these woolly-headed epi-
cures. The labourers on the sugar estates, both Coolie
and Creole, hunt and eat the large rats which infest
the cane-pieces ; and parrots are stated by Browne, in
his Natural History of Jamaica, to be largely con-
sumed by the negroes of the mountain districts, who
say they resemble pigeons in flavour. In addition
to his provision ground the negro often rents a piece
of land as a ginger " mountain," a tobacco " field,"
or a coffee " piece," according to locality. Arrow-
root and cassava are also extensively cultivated by
the small settlers in various districts of the island.
The castor-oil nut grows in luxuriance throughout
all the colony ; and as for these, and all the minor
products of the island, such as corn, starch, and
tapioca, he finds a ready sale ; if the negro is yet
inops inter opes, the fault lies with him and not with
nature.

There are two sights which the traveller in Jamaica
should never omit seeing. The one is the weekly
Saturday market of a country town j the other is a
trial, say, of a case of abusive language in the Magis-
trates' Court. From early morning, " when day just
clean," as the negro idiom has it, the roads leading
to the market town are thronged with a busy crowd.
Family groups — for on " progging day " no one ever
dreams of staying at home — follow each other in
quick succession. There goes the house-father lead-
ing a mule laden with panniers of bread-kind and
ground provisions. He is followed by his wife and

COUNTRY LIFE IN JAMAICA. 93

daughter with baskets of pumpkins and cabbages on

their heads, tramping along, one after the other,

in Indian file. Each woman is dressed in her gayest

print and her brightest handkerchief. Her apron is

embroidered with coloured threads and decorated

with texts of Scripture and moral precepts. Here

are a few examples. On one we read —

Purge me with hyssop
For I will be clean.

M. T.

On another, below a cocoa-nut tree in purple worsted —

Open to thee is Paradise :
Go in and take thy place.

A third bears —

I know that my Redeemer lives,
With Joy the sweet assurance.

A fourth —

1 am the Rose of Sharon
And the Lily of the Valy.

But perhaps the most absurd of any we ever saw is

the following, which tells its own story : —

Once the world was all to me,
But now it turns its back on me,

0 you freckle-hearted young man !

1 lay my eye at Jesus' feet
Till I find my secret love.

A. P. 1870.

Bringing up the rear is a troop of pot-bellied children
— the girls with their clothes tied up high above the
knee to give them ease in walking, the boys with
fowls under their arms, or carrying wooden trays
full of fruit and vegetables. Hobbling along with
the help of a long pimento stick, her feet encased in
sandals of untanned hide called " sand patters," is
G

94 COUNTRY LIFE IN JAMAICA.

an aged crone with a few eggs in a basket, which
she hopes to barter for a little piece of salt fish, or a
" quattie " candle.1 Her son, an able-bodied man
of five or six-and-twenty, cigar in mouth, rides be-
fore her, atop a one-eyed, tailless, crop-eared, galled,
and sorry-looking nag, already laden far beyond its
feeble strength with two heavy bags of country corn.
In the middle of the road, standing on the sides of
their feet, with their great toes crossed over each other,
two bare-necked women with beaming faces and ivory
teeth have stopped to compare notes about their last
" da-ance " at Mr. Tommy Abraham's grog-shop.
Here comes a trio of young men singing at the top
of their voices. They are brave, brawny-chested,
swashbuckler-looking fellows, rejoicing in the pride
and lustiness of their youth, and walk with swag-
gering gait and heads erect on high. The melody
of their song is pretty and quaint; most negro
melodies are. The words are quainter still, but not
pretty. Here they are : —

" Jackass with the long tail,
Bag of cocoa coming down !
Jackass with the long tail,
Bag of cocoa coming down !

Him worry me, him teasie me,
Him make me dandy leave me !
Jackass with the long tail,
Bag of cocoa coming down !"

But we must hurry on, for the sun is beginning to!

1 M Quattie," a penny-halfpenny— the "quarter" of sixpence.

The negro nomenclature of coins is as follows : — Bill, three far-
things; Fippence, threepence ; Bit, fourpence halfpenny ; Joe, six-
pence ; Mac (macaroni), a shilling.

COUNTRY LIFE IN JAMAICA. 95

rise and the market opens at six o'clock. Soon the
country town is reached, and the market enclosure
filled with a noisy, huckstering, chaffering multitude.
High in his wooden box, calm and serene, surveying
with the most perfect complacency the busy scene
below him, sits the clerk of the market, whose duty
it is to collect the market dues, to seize unwhole-
some meats and provisions, to decide petty disputes,
and, if he possibly can, to preserve decency and
order. It must be admitted that a negro crowd is
the most good-natured in the world. But " confu-
sions," in negro parlance, do occasionally take place.
The women will use abusive language to each other;
and the men, after a visit to a neighbouring cook-
shop, and stimulated by Dutch courage, will occa-
sionally buck each other with their heads. But, as
a rule, quarrels seldom occur. Bantering, chaffing,
loud laughing, and loud talking is the order of the
day. By eleven o'clock the last yam has been sold,
and the last bushel of corn disposed of. By twelve
all are on their way home, except those ignoble few
— not so few sometimes — whom business or curiosity
leads to the Magistrates' Court, whither we cannot
do better than follow.

The fondness of the negro for litigation is well
known. Every petty squabble, every trifling dis-
pute, must of necessity be settled in the court-house.
No man so poor but is able to procure funds to "go-
a-law ; " none so friendless but is able to induce per-
sons to " throw up money " to obtain for him the
services of a lawyer. Confidential communications

96 COUNTRY LIFE IN JAMAICA.'

between lawyer and client are privileged in law.
But we think our readers, sitting as a jury, will be
inclined to excuse the following breach of privilege
on the part of a legal friend in placing the subjoined
letter from a " brown " man, only a degree removed in
status and intelligence from a negro, in the author's
hands, as a specimen of the " instructions " which
country practitioners sometimes receive from their
clients : —

"Spring Garden, July 28, 1866.

" My dear Sir, — The burden of sufferings to wich
I endured are more than mortal tongue can express
of my uncharitable neighbour, which Sow thistle on
my peace and thorn in my path, which becomes an
anoyance to the Union of Society to whom proff
can testify evedently to be the instrument of riotism
I can assure you that I am almost disgusting of where
I lives and flee to Some other part of God's dominion
for refuge, for my life are even endangered by a
heavy Cloud of witnesses, and the rain of malice and
revenge (as you know that the Blacks hate all the
white & brown people, and Soon put them to the
edge of their Sword.) be poured out on the flesh of
my family circle. Keep this in mind to be ever my
loving solicitor. D. S."

But the magistrates — two planters, in white waist-
coats and trousers and alpaca jackets — have already
taken their seats on the bench. The Clerk of Petty
Sessions has installed himself at the table below.
The prisoner has pleaded " Guilty not " to the infor-
mation which charges him with having publicly

COUNTRY LIFE IN JAMAICA. 97

uttered " certain abusive and calumnious language
to the informant against the peace of Our Lady the
Queen, her crown and dignity, and against the form
of the statute in that case made and provided;" and
the first witness is mounting the steps of the wit-
ness box. After having vainly attempted to elude
the ceremony of taking the oath by kissing his thumb
instead of the book, or by not touching the Bible
with his lips — in either of which cases all that he
may say thereafter is not accounted perjury by the
negro code of morality — he is at length successfully
sworn, and a dialogue very much like the following
ensues : —

Clerk of Petty Sessions (to witness) — Now, sir,
where do you live 1

Witness — Sa !

C. P. S. (more loudly) — Where do you live, sir 1

W. — Live at Friendship district.

C. P. S.— What parish 1

W. — Cumberland.

C. P. S. — Do you know the prisoner 1

W.— No, sa !

C. P. S. — What! don't know the prisoner? Did
you never see him before 1

TV. — Oh yes, sa !

C. P. S. — Then why did you tell me you did not
know him1? Now be careful! Do you remember
the 10th July of this year?

W. — Can't rightly say the day, sa ! Last week,
Monday —

C. P. S. — Stop, sir ! You must try to remember
the date.

98 COUNTRY LIFE IN JAMAICA.

W. (with much hesitation) — It was the 15th July.

C. P. S. — What do you say, sir 1 Do you remem-
ber the 10th July?

W. (meekly) — Yes, sa !

dP.S.— What year 1

W. (evidently much depressed) — 1899, sa !

Laughter in Court.

Two Constables (at once) — Si-lence !

C. P. S.— What, sir !

Witness looks hopelessly puzzled, and does not
answer.

C. P. S.— Was it this year ?

W. (much relieved) — Yes, sa ! This year, sa !

C. P. S. — Then why did you not say so at first 1
Go on, sir !

These preliminaries disposed of, the witness pro-
ceeds tolerably enough.

W. — Last week, Monday, I was coming from my
ground. Jus' as I come to Mr. Abraham's grog-
shop—

C. P. S. — Is that at the cross roads 1

W. — Yes, sa ! Jus' as I come to Mr. Abraham's
grog-shop, I meet up with Henry Thomas, the pri-
soner. I had a crocus (Osnaburg) bag with bread-
kind on my back and my machette in my hand.
Says I to him, " Good evening, breda" (brother). He
tole me, " Good evening." So I says to him, " Good
evening."

Prisoner (interrupting) — What does I says to you %

W.—RU

C. P. S. (to prisoner) — Hold your tongue, sir;

COUNTRY LIFE IN JAMAICA. 99

you will have an opportunity of cross-examining the
witness afterwards. (To witness) — Go on, sir.

W. — So I says to Henry Thomas — " Henry
Thomas, my friend, you hoi' my bag and make I get
a drink to put in my bottle and take home to the
missus." Thomas says, " Very well." So I heave
down my bag off my shoulder and give it to him to
hold.

C. P. S. — But what did the prisoner say to you 1

W. — Please let I make you understand good.

First Magistrate (impatiently) — Yes ! yes ! But
what did the prisoner say 1

W. (sullenly, having been interrupted in his narra-
tive)— He say nothing to me, my worship !

Second Magistrate — What did he call you, then 1

W. — He called me a thief, my worship !

First Magistrate — Well, tell us about that.

W. — Well, my worship ! I says to Henry Thomas,
" Thomas, my friend, you hoi' my bag — "

C. P. S.—You We told us all that before.

W. (with an injured air) — Hi ! massa ! you no let
I make you understand.

C. P. S. (testily) — Just tell me what the prisoner
said to you.

W. — He said I was a thief.

Prisoner — I deny the question !

C. P. S. — Now give the exact words. Be careful,
for I have to take them down.

W. — He told me I was a thief, my worship.

C. P. S. (writing) — " Prisoner said to me, you are
a thief." Anything else 1

100 COUNTRY LIFE IN JAMAICA.

W. — And that I was too d — n fast, and I was too
mannish.

C. P. S. (reading) — " He further added — You are
too d — n fast, you are too mannish, or words to
that effect." Where did this occur 1

W. — Please, my worship, I 'm not done.

C. P. S. — Answer my question.

W. — This was at the cross roads, sa! At Mr.
Abraham's shop.

C. P. S. — Were you on the high road at the time?

W. — How high road, sa?

C. P. S. — Queen's road, sir I

W. — Hi ! Yes, sa ! Queen's road, to be sure.

C. P. S. — Many people there to hear what was
going on %

W. — Yes, sa! Plenty people was da (hesitat-
ingly).

C. P. S. — Were they quite near 1

W. — Far enough, sa ! (After a pause) — But not
too far !

0. P. S. — What do you mean 1 Could they hear
what was going on ?

W.— Hi ! Yes, sa I

C. P. S. (to Magistrates) — I think that 's all, your
worships ! (To prisoner) — Do you wish to ask the
witness any questions 1

Prisoner (to witness) — George Edwards !

W.— Sa!

P. — Eemember you 'pon you' oath, sa !

W.—Ei !

P. — Did I an' you ever have any confusion 1

COUNTRY LIFE IN JAMAICA. 101

W. — Of course we do.

P. — Remember you 'pon you' oath, sa !

W. (to prisoner) — Ax me questions, sa !

P. — George Edwards ! Last week, Monday, was
you coming from you' ground 1

W. — To be sure, sa !

P. — What side you' ground is %

W. — At Content, in this parish %

P. — What kind of ground it is ?

W. — Hi ! Capital cultivation, sa ! It stand well.

P. — No, sa! It lazy-man ground, sa! I have
witness to prove dat — I have witness to prove dat.

W. (horrified) — My king !

C. P. S. (to prisoner) — Go on, sir ! go on, sir !

P. (solemnly) — Missa Edwards ! Is you a Chris-
tian1?

W. — Hi ! That hab nothing to do with the
question. Ax me questions, sa !

P. — Answer me the question. Remember you
'pon you' oath, sa !

First Magistrate (to prisoner) — Go on, sir !

P. (with an air of offended dignity) — Did I call
you thief?

W. — To be sure you did.

P. (vehemently) — I deny the question ! I deny
the question ! I deny the question !

W. (indignantly)— Don't cross-cut (interrupt) me,sa!

C. P. S. (to prisoner) — Never mind. Go on with
your examination.

P. — Wasn' you in a beastly state of stopsication 1

JF.— My father ! What is this 1

102 COUNTRY LIFE IN JAMAICA.

C. P. S. (to witness) — Answer the question.
Were you in a state of intoxication 1

W. — No,- sa ! Never did sich a thing !

P. (to witness) — Did you have any evidence that
I did use that low word to you 1

W. (calling to some one in court) — Hi ! Susan
Powell ! Mrs. Powell !

P. — Who and who was in present !

Bystander — I deny the question !

Constable — Shut your mouth !

First Magistrate (to prisoner) — Do you wish to ask
the witness any more questions %

W. (appealing to Magistrate) — My respectable
worship —

C. P. S. — Hold your tongue, sir! (Addressing
prisoner) — Do you hear what the Magistrate asks
you — " Do you wish to put any further questions to
the witness?"

P. (sulkily) — Don't bother asking him any more
questions, for him won't speak de truth.

First Magistrate (to witness) — You can stand
down.

Witness is retiring, when the prisoner calls to
him, George Edwards, did I —

First Magistrate — Call the next witness.

C. P. S.— That 's the case, sir !

X.

A BATCH OF NEGRO LOVE-LETTERS.

Love letters have always constituted an important
branch of epistolary literature. They have been the
making of many a cause ceTebre, the source of many
a law-suit, a fruitful spring of pleasure and pain to
the young, and sometimes to those old enough to
know better, in every generation of the human race.
We are a little too much inclined to form our ideas
of negro manners and character from the burlesque
representations of Christy's Minstrels and others.
We are too much disposed to look upon the typical
" man and brother " as a boneless, restless, grotesque
creature, who wears shirt collars which reach long
past his ears, and a necktie of which the bows are
at least half a yard in length, — who spends his time
in playing on a banjo, occasionally diversifying his
pleasing occupation by dancing a breakdown, or cry-
ing " Yah ! yah ! " at intervals. Many of us have
yet to learn that the negroes in the West Indies are
an earnest work-a-day peasantry, having their own
characteristic faults and vices, it is true, and dis-
similar to any other peasantry in the world, but
none the less real and existent. To many a little
thatch-covered hut, half-hidden among broad-leaved

104 A BATCH OF NEGRO LOVE-LETTERS.

bananas and scarlet-foliaged Poinsettias, or over-
shadowed with white-flowered coffee plants, or buried
amidst tangled " bush " and close-enlaced brushwood,
the letters which follow have doubtless brought plea-
sure and happiness, — shadowing forth, in phrase
uncouth, nay, even grotesque, to us, but intelligible
and real enough to their recipients, " that long bright
future of which lovers dream."

" There is no pleasure like the pain
Of being loved and loving."

Penned after the day's labour on the plantation or
the penn, or amongst the yams and sweet potatoes
of his provision ground, they are the honest expres-
sion of the negro's inmost heart, the exponents of
his most sincere sentiments.

My deare Love, my dearest Dove, — I have
taken the pleasur of righten [writing] these few lines
to you, hopin when they comes to hand they may find
you in a perfect state of health, as it leaves me at
preasent. My deare, I have never felt the enjoyment
of love as I feel with you. These few lines is to let
you know that it is my intention of maryin you,
if it agreeable to you. My Deare, my mind is so
taking up with you, I cannot help from righting you.
I am not able to go on at preasant, but in time to
come I hope to be your man of business. Let her
kiss me with the kisses of her mouth, for thy love is
better than wine. As the apple-tree among the trees
of the wood, so is my love with you. Please to say

A BATCH OF NEGRO LOVE-LETTERS. 105

howdeas [how-d'ye-do] to all kind friends for me.
— I remain, love, your most affectionate love, J. A.

Wite [White]. Answer as quick as possible.

i

II.

Dear lov, — I is wrote you a letter to beg of you
to make me your lover, but you is not wrote me
again. I is dead of lov every day, wen you look so
hansom. I cane [cannot] sleep, cane eat. I dun no
how I feel. I beg you to accep af me as your lover.
The rose is not sweet as a kiss from you, my lov.
Do meet me to-night at the bottom gate, and give
me your lov. Miss Lucy toots [teeth] so green I is
like one ear of earn, an* her eye dem is so pretty.
Lard ! I wish I never been barn. Poor me, Garg !
[George]. I lov Miss Lucy to distraction. — Yours
truly, Garg Plummer. Answer me sone, lov.

in.

January, 25, 1865.
My dear Love, — I have taken the pleasure of
writing you in time, hopen when it reaches your
hand it may find you at a perfect state of health, as
it leaves me at the present time. I have seeing in
your letter, my dear, that you wisch to know from
me if it is true Love from my heart. Dearest love,
if it is not true love from the deepest part of my heart,
whold [would] I set down to write you a letter, my
Dear % When hear I see thy lovely face, my heart
within will burnt ; when hear I absent from thy
face, I long for thy return. But one thing I did

106 A BATCH OF NEGRO LOVE-LETTERS.

like to tell you again, do not make it known to
the Public before we began. The reason why I say
that. I heard a certain boy was telling me all about
it, and that only done by you tellin you feamale
friends, whom cannot help ; these one secret must
be yours, for this thing is not known to a soul but
I and you and your brother-and-law. Therefor the
fault must be yours. Do not let me hear such thing
again from any body. My dear love, I will be truly
wish that I could maried to you know [now], but if
my life is spared we shall tark [talk] further about
that. My dear, pray for me that the Lord will
speared my Life to become a man, for I truly wich
[wish] that I and you should be one fleach and one
blood. Will you not like it, my dear love 1 If you
don't wich that, let me know by your letter. My
dear girl, you don't know my love wich I have for
you. May the Lord touch your heart to know these
thing wich I now put before you in this letter. But
I must say that I am doing you arm [harm] for
taken such liberty to write you such a letter as this.
If it is a liberty please to let me know by your next
letter. Do not send me a note again for a letter.
I can not satisfy when I see a letter wich I can not
take me some time to reed. If you had not paper
let me know about in your next letter, and I will
send you some paper. My dear love, at preasant
my love for you is so strong, that I cannot express.
So I even write that you may see it. It is every
man deauty [duty] to write a formil [formal] letter.
My pen is bad, and my ink is pale, but my love will

A BATCH OF NEGRO LOVE-LETTERS. 107

never fail. King Solomon say that Love is strong
as death, and Jealousy is cruel than the grave. Love
me little, bear me longer, hasty love is not love at
all This is the first time I sat down to write you
about it. I love my Dove. Your love is black and
ruby — the chefer of ten thousand. You head is
much fine gold. You lock are bushy and black as a
raven. Your eyes was the eyes in a river, by the
rivers of warter. Your cheeks as a bead [bed] of
spices as sweet flowers. Your lips is like lilies.
Your hand as gold wring. Your legs as a pillar of
marble set upon sockets of fine gold. Your counte-
nance as a Lebenon. Your mouth look to be more
sweet. Your sweet altogether. I have no more
time to write as I am so tiard and full time to go
to bead. I will now close my letter with love. I
remain yours truly, . To Ann Williams.

IV.

My dearest dear, — It is with a perplexing heart
of anxiety that I take up my pen to address you this
time, having propos marriage to you. I am now
anxious to know the full intention of your mind,
accompany with parent. On my side, let it please
you to believe me that I am desireous to oblige you
in whatever thought or ways that you lik. if you
cannot stop up this way, but rather to be in Santi-
cross [Santa Cruz], I am very willing to do so. I feel
convinced that the merits of your family are not to
be estimated by an ordinary standard, and that their
most ardent wish is to promote your comfort and

108 A BATCH OF NEGRO LOVE-LETTERS.

happiness, believe me I feel highly honour of being
worthy elevated in such a family. In granting me
this most agreeable favour, you will, my dear girl,
not only dispel the peevish gloom which I am confi-
dent will hang over me if I should be deprive of
your society. My greatest happiness depends upon
your immediate answer. Please speak a word of
regard in your parents ears. — I remain, dear Lesia,
yours truly love, . 19. 1. '64.

v.
Dear love, — I have the liberty of writing these
few lines, hopeing that it may found you well, i
writ to hare [hear] from you wether [whether] you
intend to make me a fool. If you intent to, come
before it is too late. If you witch [wish] you can
come up, fear [for] I is not an pewpy show [puppet-
show], that if you tink you will find any better
than me. My mother said that she not understand
how you always come here and you not tel her any
thin [thing] about me. i witch to send the yam
hed [yam-heads for planting], but i do not know
wether I will reap the benefit of it. love is strong
as death. Jelous is as cruel as the grave, the rose
in June is not so sweet, like to me^t and kiss you.
please to send me answer as quick as passable.

VI.

Dear Eliza, — I take the liberty of myself to inform
you this few lines hoping you may not offend as
often is. I had often seen you in my hearts. Their

A BATCH OF NEGRO LOVE-LETTERS. 109

are myriads of loveliness in my hearts toward you.
My loving intentions were realy unto another
female, but now the love between I and she are very
out now entirely. And now his the excepted time
I find to explain to my lovely appearance [presum-
ably " apparent love "], but whether if their be any
love in your hearts or mind towards me it is hard
for I to know, but his I take this liberty to inform
you this kind, loving, and affectionate letter. I hope
when it received into your hand you receive with
peace and all good will, pleasure, and comforts, and
hoping that you might answer me from this letter
with a loving appearance, that in due time Boath of
us might be able to join together in the holy state
of matremony. I hoping that the answer which you
are to send to me it may unto good intention To me
from you that when I always goine to write you
again I may be able to write, saying, my dear lovely
Eliza. — Your affectionate lover, affraied [afraid] J.
S. Dear Eliza, wether if you are willing or not,
Please to sent me an ansure back. Do, my dear.

The last we shall give is a genuine negro valen-
tine : —

VII.

Mrs. Agostiss R — , — I hope you know Valintine
is now in seson. I will take the pleasure to write
you this, my hearth is yours and you are mine ; but
you do not know it. I love you as the bee love
the flower. The flower may fade, but true love shall

H

110 A BATCH OF NEGRO LOVE-LETTERS.

never. My love for you is a love that cannot be
fade. You shall be my love here an' in heaven for
ever. The Eose in June is not so sweet as when
two lovers kisses meet. Kiss me quick and go my
honey. I still remain true lover.

XL

SCHOOLS AND SCHOOLMASTERS.

The frequent quotations from the Song of Solo-
mon— a favourite portion of Scripture with the negro
— and the use of Solomon's words and phrases, often
entirely foreign to the sense, in the letters given in
the previous chapter, are referable to the fact that
their composition and execution is not unfrequently
the work of professional letter-writers. Foremost
amongst these stands the village schoolmaster, often
himself a negro. A painful desire to air his parrot-
acquired learning leads him into amusing blunders
and exaggerations. Take, for example, the following
letters of recommendation from a schoolmaster to a
clergyman of my acquaintance : —

Stoakes Hall.

Rev. Sir, — On my way home last Saturday I met
a Schoolmaster who has been many years a success-
ful teacher. I have no doubt but that he merits
your approbation If he continue to be equally honest
and industrious as he has hitherto been. Believing
him to be better adopted to the Teaching of the young

man Mr. with whom you were Entreaty [in

treaty], I have sent him to you for your personal
interviews, as I think Mr. whom you were

I

\

I

J
112 SCHOOLS AND SCHOOLMASTERS.

about given a trial is intrinsically Pragmatic and
Enthusiasm in his views of Methodism, and endulge
himself in Enigmatic language agiinst the Estab-
lished Church. A few of your members are Garulity
of disposition and also Pugnacious, and if you were
to have a Teacher of a Pageantry or Ostentatious
nature you will always Inextrically situated. ... I
may add that the retrogression of the W — school
does require such a master as the one I am^ now re-
commending to you, whose Efficiency I can assured
with much Salvific, that through God's blessing, Be-
for the end of the Present year, your school will
again be arisen to its highest Effulgence. Believing
that I have now relief of your long wants of a
respectable schoolmaster I can only ask for your
early reply, and beg to be your most faithful and
obedient servant, C. H. D.

In the following a husband and a schoolmaster ex-
cuses the fault of his wife to his parish minister : —
Spanish Town, March 15, 1865.

Revd. Sir, — I don't entertain the least ambiguity
that the character of a philanthropist which you
have when I was at " St. George" has been neutra-
lized, since I hav inauspiciously been separated from
you by the direful interposition of External circum-
stances on which I think from your personal experi-
ence saw that I had no controul. Hoping then that
such a character is still manifested by you, and in
consideration of which I now presume to commune
with you, cordially hoping in the interim my com-
munication will not become unworthy of your notice

SCHOOLS AND SCHOOLMASTERS. 1 1 3

or respect. From any point of view, I deem I was
quite injudicious to have departed from you, but on
the other hand, had not that been performed, neither
peace nor happiness would I have enjoyed because of
the inflexible arid impracticable companion I had had
to share a part of my being there. I maintain, sir,
that this philosophical remark of Mr. Locke is very
true — That, all our ideas emanates from " experience."
I believe furthermore, sir, that people ought to be
bold, woraien be bold, but not too bold. Bearing in
mind, pr, your Philanthropic character, permit me
kindly and with all adequate deference to solicit of
you /the favour following. Would you kindly give
m^' a recommendation to some clergyman, who you
r.nay or might have heard requires a person ? Let

not my partner's behaviour to self and Mrs. be

the means of your prohibiting your doing me some
service, for I think I can safely assert, she has re-
pented. " Ira furer brevis est." Permit me to en-
quire after the health of Mrs. , self, and circle,

and accepting my humble, cordial regards, I am,
Rev. Sir, your obedient servant, .

These village schoolmasters are not without am-
bition in their way. On a tamarind tree at the
gate of one of these hedge schools in the parish of
St. Ann's, if my memory does not fail me, I found
affixed the following advertisement : —

" English, rethmecktich, and jimmetry {Query,
geometry?) taught in firs rate style and cheapes
rates by A. B., Professer of the Gospel."

Occasionally, too, they appear before the public as

114 SCHOOLS AND SCHOOLMASTERS.

lecturers, choosing the most abstruse and sublime
themes, such as " Man's Moral Obligation to Man,"
for the subjects of their discourses. A circular of
one of these gentry concludes thus :- —

" The Lecturer solicits your kind patronage under
any circumstance ; he is endeavouring "by his orations
to supplement his means, so as to be able to qualify
for a Profession in the Inns of Court, London."

One other little scene from the villagev school ere
we close this chapter. It is early morning. Some
threescore children, of all ages and both sexe^s, have
met to commence the labours of the day. The\negro
schoolmaster, fiddle in hand, is marshalling them " into
classes; and the children — well! it was a Baptist
School in a very remote part of the country — ai 8
taking their places to the following hymn : —

" Come, Jesus with the shining face,
, Come down and bless thine infant race,
We all assembled shall be there
At half-past nine, at the hour of prayer."

The hymn over, the schoolmaster lays aside his
violin, and proceeds to read aloud an exercise in
dictation to his elder pupils. The passage which he
has selected describes the sufferings of a goat pursued
by the hunters. The pedagogue's voice swells and
rolls delightedly over the long many-syllabled words.
As he warms to his work his emphasis grows more
marked, his gestures more abundant ; and ludicrous
is his air of self-satisfaction when at last he closes
his book with the words " and, thus happily eluding
his fate, the goat soat (sought) and found an asylum,
in a sequestrated spot."

XII.

ANNANCY STORIES.

Reference has frequently been made in the pre-
ceding pages to the popular tales — the Annancy
stories — of the negroes in Jamaica. Corresponding
to the fairy tales of more northerly regions, they
have been the delight and the amusement of many
a generation of young Creoles, white, black, brown,
and yellow. Nor, indeed, have they wanted admirers
amongst children of a larger growth. No pleasanter
picture of peasant comfort and enjoyment is to be
seen in Jamaica than that of a circle of negroes
seated around some village story-teller as he recounts
the cunning and exploits of Annancy.

The chief repositories of this traditional literature
are children and old women. It is essentially the
literature of a race, not of a nation. Essentially a
child of the soil, its subjects are almost exclusively
drawn from the common daily incidents of a country
life. " It scarcely ever rises above Gungo peas and
Afoo yams. It reflects the inward feeling and out-
ward circumstances of a very simple and a very
unpolished peasantry." 1

1 From an admirable Paper on Negro Literature in the Transac-
tions of the Jamaica Royal Society of Arts and Agriculture. New
Series, vol. i. No. 4, p. 64.

116 ANNANCY STORIES.

The principal hero of this autochthonic literature
is the large black Annancy spider. He is the per-
sonification of cunning and success — two qualities
which have an especial charm for the negro mind.1
" He is the Jove, the Thor, the Bramah of negro
mythology. His great strength is in his cunning,
and in his metamorphic versatility ; he out-Proteuses
Proteus. His parentage is utterly unknown — nor
indeed does it seem referred to in any of the An-
nancy stories."2 The other personages who figure
in the tales are Annancy's wife Crookie, and Ta-
cooma his reputed son. " Tacooma is a person quite
by himself. He seems without parallel in any other
mythology. He helps his father or not, as he thinks
fit. He is stronger than his father, but has less
cunning ; and when he, the strong, and the father,
the cunning, do unite, woe to the victim they attack !
As regards Annancy and his wife, they engage in

1 The philosophy of these stories is well explained by Dr. Da-
sent in his Norse Tales : " They are called ' Ananzi Stories,' be-
cause so many of them turn on the feats of Ananzi, whose char-
acter is a mixture of 'the Master- thief,' and of 'Boots;' but the
most curious thing about him, is that be illustrates the Beast Epic
in a remarkable way. In all the West Indian Islands, ' Ananzi ' is
the name of spiders in general, and of a very beautiful spider with
yellow stripes in particular. The Negroes think that this spider is
the ' Ananzi ' of their stories, but that his superior cunning enables
him to take any shape he pleases. In fact, he is the example which
the African tribes, from which these stories came, have chosen to
take as pointing out the superiority of wit over brute strength.
In this way they have matched the cleverness and dexterity of the
Spider against the bone and muscle of the Lion, invariably to the
disadvantage of the latter."— Introduction to Appendix, p. 485.

2 " Negro Literature "—Trans. Jamaica Royal Soc, vol. i. p. 65,
new series.

ANNANCY STORIES. 117

squabble, which, had the pair been human, might
have led them to the Divorce Court, but which, for
matrimonial objurgation, are fit to rank with those
splendid 'passages' between Jupiter and Juno."1

Many of the Annancy stories exist only as point-
less, disjointed, mutilated fragments. Others of
them break off abruptly just when the interest has
reached its highest point.

The specimens which follow have been taken
down from the lips of the narrators. Much of their
dramatic effect must, of necessity, be lost in their
transcription. The action, the imitation of An-
nancy's drawl, the alternation of tones by which
the various personages are distinguished, the little
fragments of song introduced, it was of course im-
possible to reproduce. To have given them too, in
all the baldness of the negro dialect, would have
rendered them unintelligible to the English reader.
Still we trust that we have deprived them of no
part of their essential character.

Without further preface, therefore, here follows
the legend of

Annancy and the Tiger.

Once upon one time, long before Queen Victoria
come to reign over we, Annancy and Tiger were
both courting de same young lady. Dey was both
bery jalous of each other. So when Annancy one
day go to dis lady's yard, him say to her dat Tiger
was noting better dan his father's old riding-horse.
1 " Negro Literature," ut supra, p. 65.

118 ANNANCY STORIES.

Little time after Tiger come to call 'pon him sweet-
heart. But de young lady say to him, " Go 'long,
sa! How can you come courting me when you
know you is noting but Missa Annancy's father's
old riding-horse ? "

" Warra ! " cried Tiger, " who tell you dis one
great big lie 1 "

" Hi ! " said de lady, " is dis a way to speak to
me? Go 'long wid you, you old good-for-noting
jackass riding-horse ! "

" My fader ! " said Tiger, " what is dis 1 It favour
like you have a suspich 'pon me, ma'am. (It looks as
if you were suspicious of me.) But I tell you, ma'am,
what I will do. I will go straight 'long to Breda
(Brother) Annancy, an' make him to tell me what
time I eber turn his fader's old jackass riding-horse."

So de lady say to him, " Well, go 'long, sa ! "

Then Tiger take up him stick, and him stick him
junky pipe in his cheek, and go straight to Annancy's
yard. When him get there, he found Annancy lying
in his bed down with fever. So him lift de latch,
and call out, " Breda Annancy ! Breda Annancy ! "

Annancy hear him bery well j but him jus' say,
so soft, " Dear Tiger, you call me I "

Tiger reply, " Yes, I call you. I come to you. I
want to hear good from you to-day, because lady tell
me you say I noting but your fader's old jackass
riding-horse, and I come to make you prove it."

" Hi ! " said Annancy, " don't you see I hab fever 1
My stomach pain me bad, an' I hab jus' taken doc-
tor's medicine ! "

ANNANCY STORIES. 119

" Cho ! " replied Tiger.

" After I hab jus' eaten two pills, Breda Tiger,
how you think I can go to de lady yard to prove
that rude word to-night 1 "

" I don't want to hab any conconsa (argument)
wid you, Breda," replied Tiger, " but you mus' jus'
show the lady dis night when I turn you fader old
jackass riding-horse."

"0 king!" cried Annancy, "an' dis cataplasm
upon my breast, it burn me so ! Howsomever, I
will try to go wid you to de lady."

Then Tiger say, " Well, Breda, since you so kind,
don't mind ; I will carry you on my back."

" Wait a minute, den, Breda, an' I will try to rise
out of my bed."

But him fall back. Den him cry out, " Dear ! I
can't get up at all. Do, I beg you, Breda, come
raise me up." Tiger raised him up.

So when Annancy rise up, him go to the rafter,
and take down him saddle.

" Hi ! " said Tiger, " what you going to do wid
daU"

" Jus' to put it upon your back, Breda, for me to
sit down soft, becausing you see I am well sick."

" Neber mind, den," said Tiger, " put it on."

Then Annancy got his bridle and reins.

" Hi ! " said Tiger, " an' what are you going to do
widdat?"

" Jus' to put 'pon your mouth, Breda, to pull you
up when you walk too fast."

" All right," said Tiger, " put dem on."

120 ANNANCY STORIES.

Then Annancy took out his horse- whip.

" Hi ! " said Tiger, " an' what are you going to do
wid dat?"

" When fly come 'pon your ear, Breda, I will take
dis whip and lick it off."

Tiger say, " Well, take it."

Then Annancy put on his spurs.

" Hi ! " said Tiger, " what are you going to do
wid dat?"

" When fly come 'pon your side, Breda, I will
touch dem wid my spur, an' make them fly off."

" Nebber mind, den," said Tiger, " put them on."

Then Annancy called out, " Now, den, Breda
Tiger, stoop down, an' let I mount you." So Tiger
stooped down, an' Annancy mounted 'pon him back.
Tiger den began to walk off.

But as him walk too fast, Annancy pull him up
wid de bridle.

" Stop, Breda ! take time ; my head hurt me so ! "

Tiger went on till he go a mile. In a little, An-
nancy take him horse-whip and fetch Tiger a lick
on the ear.

" Hi ! " said Tiger, " what dat fo, sa ? "

" Cho ! " replied Annancy, " what a 'tupid fly !
Shoo, you fly ! "

"All right, Breda," said Tiger, "but nex' time
don't lick so hot."

Tiger go on again for anoder mile. Then An-
nancy stick his spur into his side.

Tiger gabe one big jump, and cry out, " Warra !
what dat I "

ANNANCY STORIES. 121

" Dem bodersome flies, Breda ; dey bite your
side so."

Then Tiger go on for another half-mile, till he
come to the lady's yard.

Now de lady's house had two doors, a front one
and a back one. Just as he came to de entrance of
de yard, Annancy rise up in him saddle, like how
jockey run race on Kingston racecourse, and him
take out him whip and him lash Tiger well.

"Hi!" cried Tiger, "you lick too hot!" But
Annancy lash him up the more, till Tiger gallop.
Then Annancy took his spurs and stuck dem into
Tiger's side, till he drove him right up to de lady's
door-mouth.

Then Annancy took off his hat, an' waved it
above his head, and say to the lady, who was stand-
ing at the door, " Hi ! Missis, me no tell you true
dat dis Tiger noting but my fader's old riding-
horse 1 " So him leap off Tiger, and go into de
lady's house. But Tiger gallop off, and never was
heard of no more.

Many of the Annancy stories serve to illustrate
natural facts. In the following, for instance, the
baldness of head of the Carrion Crow or Turkey
Buzzard is amusingly illustrated. These vultures,
the scavengers of tropical cities, cannot fail to attract
the attention of the traveller, almost upon his first
arrival in Jamaica. So useful are they deemed to
be by the Creoles that a local Act inflicts a fine upon
any person whc H'lls one. Their sense of smell is

122 ANNANC Y STORIES.

exquisite; and it is stated as a curious fact, that
during the so-called Eebellion of 1865, the island
was deserted by the John Crows, except in the
parishes of St. Thomas and Portland, where the
frightful scenes of carnage and of slaughter were
being enacted.

Why the John Crows have Bald Pates.

In a before time there libed a man who hated de
John Crows and wanted to destroy dem. But how-
somdever him neber get de opportunity, an' de John
Crows still libed to vex him.

But John Crow tink himself dandy man, an' it
griebe him heart to tink that after all him had neber
been christened. So him call a meeting of all him
frien' an relation, an' dey resolve to go ask man to
christen him an' gib him a name.

When man hear this he rejoice greatly, an' him
say to himself, " Cunny (cunning) better dan 'trong
(strength). Now I will hab my vengeance 'pon my
enemies."

So him appoint a day, an' him tell John Crow to
mek a feast, an' to kill a big hog, an' to buy a little
rum an' a little port-wine, an' plenty of salt fish an'
yam an' oder vittles.

On de day him name all de John Crows of dat
country gadered demselves togeder. And one brought
beef, an' anoder brought ham, an' anoder a sucking pig,
an' anoder fowls; an' dere was yams and cocoas, an'
sweet potatoes, an' ebryting, an' plenty of liquor.

An' when de man com to de place where de eating
match was to be, him bring wid him a big barrel

ANNANCY STORIES. 123

full of American flour, which him said was him con-
tribution to do feast. Den all de John Crows clapped
deir wings wid joy, an' said: " Hi! de good buckra!"
But de man only smile to himself an' say, " * To-day
feme, to-morrow fe you;' 'When fowl merry, hawk
catch him chicken ; ' ' Hide fe me, talk fe you j '
1 You shake my han', but you no shake my heart !' " l
Then him turn to de John Crows and say, " When
you hab plenty you boil pot," an' he bid dem light
a fire, for he said he would need to boil de flour an'
water togeder to make a grand cake for de chris-
tening.

When de barrel of flour was empty an' de flour
an' de water was boiling, bubblin' up 'pon de fire,
he call all de John Crows roun' him an' say, " You
see dis barrel ya (here) tM

Dey all say, " Yes, we see it."

" Bery well," he say, " come roun' an' put all you
heads into it, an' you musn' lif up your head or look
roun' till I tell you, fo I hab someting secret to mek
ready fe de christening." So dey all put deir head
into de barrel, an' de barrel was chockful of deir head.

Den de man took de cauldron of boilin' water an'
him step up behind dem softly, softly, an' den he
lift up de pot an' pour all de boiling stuff 'pon deir
heads, an' him laugh an' him say, " Dead fe true !
Dis is de way I christen you, John Crow !"

But after all dey was not dead. Only when dey
got better dey found all deir head peel (bald) where
de boilin' water fell 'pon dem.

An' dis is why John Crows hab bald pates to dis day.
1 Negro proverbs.

124 ANNANCY STORIES.

Of the same kind is the story entitled

Why Hawks eat Fowls.

Long time ago Fowl was Hawk's mother. One
day Hawk was going to him work when he see little
Ground Dove playing on a flute, and singing so sweet,
" Fee, fee, fee tender ! " »

" Marning, Ground Dove," said Hawk.

" Marning, sa," him reply, " how you is to-day 1"

" So-so, I tank you. Hi ! what a pretty ting dat
is you play 'pon you flute !

" Tink so, sa?" said Ground Dove; an' him put
up him flute to him mouth an' play again,

"Fee, fee, fee tender !"

" Do, I beg you, len' me you' flute, cousin Ground
Dove. It soun' so sweet."

But Ground Dove say, " No, cousin, me could n'
do it."

" Hi ! " say Hawk, " you so quarry-quarry 2 you
no let I mek my old moder Fowl hear you flute?"

" No, cousin," answer Ground Dove. " You no
know what de old-time people say, " 'Pider (Spider)
an' fly no mek good bargains ! I could n' do it, sa,
I could n' do it."

Den Hawk spring 'pon Ground Dove, an' tear up
him feathers, an' mash him up wid him beak, an'
lef (leave) him fe dead 'pon de dirt.3 An' him take
away him flute, an' so carry away go home.

1 An imitation of the note of the ground dove.
* Quarrelsome. 3 Earth— ground.

ANNANCY STORIES. 125

An' when Hawk come to him house he go into
him hall to de ches' ob drawers dat stan' da, an* him
open de one drawer, de two drawer, de tree drawer,
de four drawer, de five drawer, de six drawer, till
him come to de twelve drawer ; an' him put de flute
into de twelve drawer, an' come back sit down.

Den he turn to him moder Fowl an' say, " Gran-
die, if any come to you, ask you fe give him de flute
me put in de twelve drawer, you is not to give it
him. Yerry ?" (do you hear ?) An' him moder say,
" Yes, sa! me hear." Den Hawk say, " An', Grandie,
you mus' hab my breakfas' ready an' keep him hot
till me come back from de field. Yerry I "

An' him moder say, " Yes, sa ! me yerry."

Den Hawk take up him hoe an' him machette an'
go to him ground.

But all dis time little Ground Dove had fol-
lowed Hawk, an' when him tell him moder where
him put de flute, him listen behin' de door, an' hear
what him did say.

So when Hawk gone, Ground Dove come out
from behin' de door, an' go into Hawk's house. By
dis time Grandie fowl done cook Hawk breakfas',
an' was sitting aside de kitchen fire smokin' her pipe.

" Good-day, godmother," said Ground Dove.

" Good-day, my dear."

" Godmother," said Ground Dove, " Cousin Hawk
sent me to tell you to gib me him breakfas' to carry
to him in de field, and de flute which him put in de
twelve drawer to make him play an' sing."

But Fowl say, " Go long wid you, pickny ! You
I

126 ANNANCY STORIES.

tell me one big story — me no go give you one
ting."

Ground Dove begin to cry. Den him say, " God-
mother, you tink a little ting like me would tell you
such a lie ? No, ma'am! me wouldn' do it; me
wouldn' do it."

But Fowl still sit by de fire an' smoke him pipe.#

Ground Dove cry more.

Den Fowl get angry and say, " Hi ! Cho ! you
too foolish. Don't winka-winka at me (neigh like a
horse). Go long wid you, Cho !"

But Ground Dove cry on still.

"Cho!" said Fowl, "it 'tan too 'tupid" (The
matter is too absurd).

But Ground Dove go on cry so bad dat at las'
Fowl get terrify. Den she rise up from her seat,
take de flute from de drawer, and gib it, wid de
breakfas', to Ground Dove, fe go carry it to Hawk in
him field. Ground Dove dry him eyes, put him flute
to him mout' an' play so sweet,

"Fee, fee, fee tender,"

and so go leave de house.

As him went along him eat Hawk's breakfas', but
him take de flute an' hide him under him wing till
him come to a lignum vitce bush close by where
Hawk was at work in him field. Then him took
out him flute, and begin to play

" Fee, fee, fee tender,"
again.

Hawk heard him. Hi ! but him well warify (in
a great passion) when him yerry dis. Him throw

ANNANCY STORIES. 127

down him hoe, an' him throw down him machette,
an' him curse him moder for a " cra-cra " (careless),
" bogro-bogro" (coarse), " takro-takro" (ugly), " chaka-
chaka" (disorderly), "buffro-bufFro" (clumsy), "wenya-
wenya" (meagre), "nana" (old woman); an' him
stalk away out of him ground to him moder house.

When him come to de yard him call out, " Moder! "
But him moder no answer him. She was afraid.
Den him walk into de house, an' him go up to de
ches' ob drawers, an' him open de one drawer, an' de
two drawer, de tree drawer, de four drawer, de five
drawer, de six drawer, till him come to de twelve
drawer. But him no find him flute. Den him cross
de yard, an' step up to him moder, an' say, " Hi !
ma'am, you gib my flute to Groun' Dove, do you 1
Where my breakfas' ?"

But him moder no answer him. She was afraid.

So Hawk say, " Yerry, ma'am 1 where my break-
fas', ma'am?"

Den him moder fall down a' him feet an' say,
"Sa! You no' sen' little Ground Dove ya (here),
make I gib him you breakfas' fe go carry to you in
de field, and you flute fe mak you play an' sing]"

" You tief ! " said Hawk, " me neber sen' any one
ya!"

" Wi ! 0 me moder me dead ! " x cry out poor
Fowl.

But Hawk reply, " You tief, you witch ! you shall
be my breakfas' ! "

Den him pounce 'pon Fowl, an' shake her, an' tear

1 An exclamation implying great fear and personal danger.

128 ANNANCY STORIES.

her till her dead : an' den him eat her for him
breakfas'!"

An' dis is why eber since Hawks eat Fowls.

Of the same character is the tale known by the
title —

Why Toads walk on Four Legs.

Once upon a time dere was a Prince, an' him rich
— hi ! him so rich him fling 'way money as if it had
been a rockatone (stone) : an' him so proud dat him
say dere neber was woman good 'nough fo him fe
marry. Now dere lib close to him an ole ole witch,
an' her name was Kecundadundundadrumunday. An'
when him1 (she) hear what Prince say, him make up
him mind fe marry him. So she borrow a silk dress
and a carriage and horses, and when she walk into
de carriage her dress go " shwee, shwee, shwee," an'
eberybody turn fe look after him. Hi ! but she
look beautiful fe true ! An' when de Prince see her
in her carriage, him cry out wid delight an' say,
" 0 de young lady is come at last fe me fe marry ! "
But de ole witch threw herself back in de carriage,
an' wouldn' look at him.

Howsomeber, after a time dey make it up all right,
an' de wedding day was fix, and a fat hog kill, an'
de wedding cake bought, an' eberyting.

Now at dis time Toad was buckra gentleman, an'

1 The personal pronouns feminine and neuter are almost un-
known in negro phraseology. We have introduced them in these
tales once or twice to render their language more intelligible to the
English reader.

ANNANCY STORIES. 129

hiui walk 'pon two leg, an' him had his hat stuck a'
one side of his head, an' a long tail coat, an* high-
heel boot, an' his shirt collar 'tan' up like a jackass
donkey mane. An' him smoke cigar all day, an'
when him walk him boot go " quee, quee ! "

So him go to de Prince, an' him tell him dat de
young lady him a going fe marry was noting but an
ole witch, an' her name was Recundadundunda-
drumunday.

So de Prince went an' see de young lady, an' tell
him that him couldn' marry him.

Hi ! de ole witch get angry ! Him knock off him
silk dress : him tie on him junky (short) blue frock
roun' him waist, him stick him broken pipe in a one
side of him mouth, and him fling him mortar stick
over him shoulder, an' go 'long fe find out who tell
de Prince dis ting.

An' on de road him meet up wid a cow, an' him
say, " You, cow ! you, cow ; was it you dat call me
Recundadundundadrumunday V

But him say, " No, missus ! me wouldn' do sich a
thing."

Den him went on an' him meet a sheep, an' him
say, " You, sheep ! you, sheep ! was it you dat call me
Recundadundundadrumunday % "

But him say, " No, Missus ! Me wouldn do sich
a thing ! "

Den him meet up wi' Toad. An' Toad say,
" How d'ye, Missus ? Hi ! if it isn' my ol' frien'
Recundadundundadrumunday ! "

130 ANNANCY STORIES.

An' when de ole witch hear dis, him know who it
was who tell de Prince. So him run up 'pon him,
an' him take him mortar stick, an' beat Toad till him
lie down like dead.

An' dat why Toads walk on four legs to dis day.

XIII;
0 B E A H.

Of all the motive powers which influence the
negro character, by far the most potent, as it is also
the most dangerous, is that of Obeah.

" Obeah in Jamaica," says Mr. Beckford Davis, in
his evidence before the Eoyal Commission,1 " is a
twofold art. It is the art of poisoning, combined
with the art of imposing upon the credulity of ignor-
ant people by a pretence of witchcraft." The obeah
man or woman is one of the great guild or fraternity
of crime. Hardly a criminal trial occurs in the
colony in which he is not implicated in one way or
another. His influence over the country people is
unbounded. He is the prophet, priest, and king of
his district. Does a maiden want a charm to make
her lover " good " to her 1 does a woman desire a
safe delivery in child-birth 1 does a man wish to be
avenged of his enemy, or to know the secrets of
futurity 1 — the obeah-man is at hand to supply the
means and to proffer his advice. Under the style
and title of a " bush doctor," he wanders from place
1 Jamaica Royal Commission, 28t,h day, p. 521.

132 OBEAH.

to place, exacting " coshery " from his dupes on all
hands : supplied with food by one, with shelter by
another, with money by a third, denied nought, from
the mysterious terror with which he is regarded, and
refused nothing from fear of the terrible retribution
which might be the consequences of such a rash act.
His pretensions are high : but he has means at hand
to enforce them. He can cure all diseases ; he can
protect a man from the consequences of his crime ;
he can even reanimate the dead. His knowledge
of simples is immense. Every bush and every tree
furnishes weapons for his armoury. Unfortunately,
in too many instances more potent agents are not
wanting to his hand. His stock-in-trade consists of
lizards' bones, old egg-shells, tufts of hair, cats' claws,
ducks' skulls, an old pack of cards, rusty nails, and
things of that description. " Grave-dirt," that is,
earth taken from where a corpse has been buried, is
also largely used. " It is supposed that if an obeah-
man throws it at a person he will die." x But ground
glass, arsenic, and other poisons, are not unfrequently
found among the contents of the obeah-man's " puss-
skin" wallet; and it is not difficult to conjecture for
what purposes these are employed.

As an outward and visible sign of his power, the
obeah-man sometimes carries about with him a long
staff or wand, with twisted serpents, or the rude
likeness of a human head carved round the handle.
He has his cabalistic book, too, full of strange char-
acters, which he pretends to consult in the exercise
1 Mr. Davis's Evidence, Royal Commission, p. 522.

OBEAH. 133

of his calling. One of these is now in my posses-
sion. It is an old child's copy-book, well thumbed
and very dirty. Each page is covered with rude
delineations of the human figure, and roughly-traced
diagrams and devices. Between each line there runs
a rugged scrawl, intended to imitate writing. The
moral precepts engraved at the head of each page
seem strangely out of place with the meaningless
signs and symbols which occupy the remainder of its
space.

There is something indescribably sinister about
the appearance of an obeah-man, which is readily ob-
served by persons who have mixed much with the
negroes. With a dirty handkerchief bound tightly
round his forehead, and his small, bright, cunning
eyes peering out from underneath it, he sometimes
visits the courts of petty sessions throughout the
island, if some unfortunate client of his who has got
into trouble requires his aid to defend him. On one
occasion a notorious thief was brought up before one
of these local tribunals, charged with stealing a few
shillings' worth of ground provisions. Instead of em-
ploying a lawyer he committed his defence to an
obeah-man, who promised him, in consideration of a
fee of £3, 3s., that on the day of trial he would
attend in court, and by " fixing the eye " of the pre-
siding magistrate, obtain the prisoner's acquittal.
But, all the same, the man was convicted and sen-
tenced to three months' imprisonment, with hard
labour.

Serpent or devil worship is by no means rare in

134 OBEAH.

the country districts; and of its heathen rites the
obeah-man is invariably the priest. Many of them
keep a stuffed snake in their huts as a domestic
god — a practice still common in Africa, from which
of course the custom has been derived.1 One of the
commonest deceptions which the obeah-man prac-
tises upon his dupes, is by persuading them that
they have lost their shadows.2 " I was present,"
says Mr. Barclay, " some years ago, at the trial of a
notorious obeah-man, driver on an estate in the
parish of St. David, who, by the overwhelming in-
fluence he had acquired over the minds of his de-
luded victims, and the more potent means he had
at command to accomplish his ends, had done great
injury among the slaves on the property before it
was discovered. One of the witnesses, a negro be-
longing to the same estate, was asked — ' Do you
know the prisoner to be an obeah-man V ' Eesi
massa; shadow-catcher true.' ' What do you mean by
shadow-catcher?' ' Him heb coffin [a little coffin pro-
duced] him set fo catch dem shadow! ' What shadow
do you mean?' ' When him set obeah for summary

1 " Among the annual festivals is the pilgrimage of the nation of
Fida to the great serpent. The people, collected before the house
of the serpent, lying upon their faces, worship his supposed di-
vinity, without daring to look upon him." — Prichard, Natural
History of Man, p. 533. The Fida, besides the great serpent which
is adored by the whole nation, have each their particular smaller
serpents, which are worshipped as household gods, but are not
esteemed so powerful by far as the great one, to whom the smaller
serpents are subjected. — Prichard, p. 527.

2 See case given in Waddell's West Indies and Central Africa,
p. 138. London, 1863.

OBEAH. 135

(somebody) him catch dem shadow and dem go dead.'
And too surely they were soon dead, when he pre-
tended to have caught their shadows, by whatever
means it was effected." 1 The same superstition was
found by Mr. Waddell in full force in Calabar ; and
it may assist in enabling us to understand its mean-
ing, when we keep in view that in the language of
that country the word for " shadow " is the same as
that for " soul." 2

I have before me the records of the slave courts
held for the parish of Portland between the years
1805 and 1816. They are full of cases of Obeah.
One woman attempts to murder her master by put-
ting arsenic into his noyeau; another by mixing
pounded glass with his coffee; a third is charged
with practising upon the credulity of his fellow-slaves
by pretending to cure another of a sore in his leg,
and " taking from thence sundry trifles, — a hawk's
toe, a bit of wire, and a piece of flesh."

On 2 2d February 1831 William Jones was tried
and sentenced to death " for conspiring and contriv-
ing to destroy William Ogilvie, overseer of Fairy
Hill estate in the parish of Portland." The notes
of the evidence taken at the trial state : — " This pro-
secution arises out of the confession of Thomas
Lindsay, who was shot to death 'pursuant to the
sentence of a court-martial, on the 31st day of January
1832. The part of the confession which inculpates

1 Barclay's Present State of Slavery in the West Indies, pp.
190-191. London, 1827.

2 Waddell, p. 139.

136 OBEAH.

William Jones is as follows : — ' About three weeks
before Christmas me and David Anderson, and Wil-
liam Kainey, and Alexander Simpson being together,
the devil took hold of us, tell us we must destroy the
overseer; and he agreed to go to a man named
William Jones, belonging to Providence Mountain,
an obeah-man, to give us something to kill the
busha, so that his horse may throw him down and
break his neck in a hole. Jones said as this was a
great thing he could not do it for less than a doub-
loon, and we had only five shillings to give him.
But we agree to carry him a barrow (a hog) with
five dollars, and a three-gallon jug of rum, and three
dollars in cash. He then gave us something and
told us to give it to the waiting-boy to throw it in
the water, and that would kill him. The waiting-
boy, James Oliver, did throw it into the water,
but it did the busha no harm, and. the waiting-boy
said the obeah-man was only laughing at us. We
then went to the obeah-man, and he said the wait-
ing-boy could not have put the things into the water.
And then he came himself one day, took the bag of
an ant's house, etc. etc. etc."' "Here," says the
report, " follows an account of obeah tricks prac-
tised." It then goes on : — " David Anderson, sworn.
He [witness] was run away three months before
Christmas in consequence of the overseer flogging
him for stealing some rum from his brother Henry
Simpson and putting water in the place of it. He
and four others went to William Jones. William
Eainey explained the cause of their coming — that he

OBEAH. 137

carried one macaroni, and four bitts, and a jug of rum,
and that Alexander Simpson carried a pig. The
obeah-man (the prisoner) asked a doubloon. He
gave them something in a nancy bag pounded up,
which James Oliver put into the busha's drink, but
it did not do him. That they then fetched the
obeah-man down to the estate, where he gave them
something to pub in the step of the door — all to
kill the busha. The prisoner had a cutacoo. They
gave him a two-dollar piece, beside the money they
had before given.

" Benny Simpson, Fairy Hill, sworn — Says the pri-
eoner came into the house of her father, Adam
Fisher, where he stayed two weeks, and that he was
employed making obeah to kill the busha. She was
afraid of the man. Thomas Lindsay, Davy Ander-
son, and Sammy Taylor brought him there. She
was not allowed to go into the house, as he was
making obeah to kill the busha. William Eainey
showed the guilty parties the pass to find out prisoner.
When her daddy, Adam Fisher, heard that James
Purrier was taken up, he went away, saying he would
destroy himself. He has not been heard of since."

On the 13th April of the same year William
Fisher was tried and convicted for pretending to
supernatural power. Edward Francis, slave to Fair-
field, being " sworn and admonished," said : — " On
Wednesday, about the first week in May of last year,
I was at my father-in-law's house. This was shortly
after Mr. Speed came as overseer to the estate.
Tom, alias Richard Mein, Richard Passley, the driver

138 OBEAH.

of Fairfield, prisoner, and others, came in. Fisher
called for a fowl's egg, which he put into a basin.
Tom Crowder sat beside him. Fisher threw rum
over the egg, and set it on fire, and when the egg
was boiled in the rum he broke it, gave it to Tom to
suck, who declined. Fisher, after sucking the egg,
rubbed part of the shell in his hand until it was
mashed. He then put it with some stuff which he
said was cinnamon into a phial. It was a thing
which he said would turn anybody's mind. He
then gave it to me, and said it was to be given to
driver Richard, who would give it to the horse-
stable-boy, to put under the horse's tail, when the
horse would throw the busha, Mr. Speed, down and
break his neck. I was obliged to go back to Fair-
field to fetch the money before he gave me the phial.
He would not trust me without I got the money from
Justina. Fisher likewise gave me some of the egg-
shell, and [told me] to rub it up and strew it about
the yard — that if the stuff in the phial did not make
the horse throw the busha, this would. Robert
Mein [slave] to Cold Harbour, had a bad leg. Fisher
pricked the place, and black blood came. Fisher then
sucked the part and spit out two beads. At another
time, when I ran away, I met Fisher in the pass,
and he took me up to his mountain and gave me a
bush to chew, and said if I went home without it I
should get firm fum, as the busha was swearing after
me very much. I gave him four bits for it. When
I went home busha did fum me, and I then went
back to Fisher to get the money from him. He said,

OBEAH. 139

* No, there is a different way to manage the busha,'
which was to kill him. On the Wednesday night
before mentioned, Fisher gave Solomon Passley a
little bit of stick, which he told him to chew and
spit it all about the pass, and this would kill busha.
The whole estate said they would go to somebody
to kill the busha. They all agreed to look out for
a man for that purpose.

" By Court. — What money did you give Fisher for
the stuff in the phial 1

" Half-a-dollar, which Justina gave me.

" Did you not go to fetch Fisher 1

" No ; driver Eichard sent me to get the stuff. He
said in the mill-house that every one must throw up
money to kill the busha.

" Did Justina complain to you of your having kept
the money and not given it to Fisher ?

" She said I had eaten the money, I had not given
it to Fisher, as no good had come. Fisher had not
killed the busha, and the money was given for so-so.

" What did you do with the phial ?

" I carried it and broke it against the horse-stable,
and covered it with dirt.

" Was it the intention of the whole estate's people
to kill Mr. Speed ?

" Yes, we all employed Fisher."

" Alexander Hartley to Fairfield, sworn — saith that
he knows Fisher. He is a Mungola man. He is a
bush man — an obeah man. Heard when runaway,
and living in a cave, that money had been thrown
up for the purpose of killing Mr. Speed."

140 OBEAH.

The practice of Obeah amongst the humbler classes
is still, unfortunately, as prevalent at the present
day, despite the severely penal laws against it, as it
was in the beginning of the century.

A local paper, The Gleaner of 26th January 1869,
quoting from The Falmouth Post, relates the following
story : —

" During the past week the town of Lucea was
kept in a state of considerable excitement, in conse-
quence of a report which was circulated and believed,
not only by the lower but middling classes, that a
Spanish jar, containing a large quantity of gold coins,
had been discovered in the yard adjoining the pre-
mises of a black man, named Johnson, near to Weir
Park settlement, about a mile from the town of
Lucea. The report of the discovery was strengthened
by the assertion of several persons, male and female,
that preparations on an extensive scale, and com-
mensurate with the stated value, were being made
for the purpose of taking up the jar and its contents.
We instituted an inquiry, and ascertained that many
of the friends of the man Johnson were assisting
in doing all he suggested, — that obeah-men were
employed by the parties immediately concerned, —
that the obeah-men were supplied with an abun-
dance of food and liquor, — and that nights were
passed in the performance of superstitious rites which
disturbed the Christian-minded villagers in the neigh-
bourhood. A white cock was killed on one occasion,
for -the purpose of carrying out one of the objects
that was declared necessary, and there were sacrifices

OBEAH. 141

of goats and pigs, the spilling of blood in all direc-
tions, and the commission of other abominations, which
we have neither time nor inclination to mention.

"On Sunday, 17th instant, the excitement was
greater than on preceding days. One of the crowd
remarked, that all attempts made to take the jar
from the earth would be unavailing, until human
blood was sprinkled on the land, — 'that human
blood must be used, for nothing else would answer.'
On hearing this remark, and seeing that hundreds of
persons were on their way to the spot, and that the
constabulary were proceeding thither for the main-
tenance of order, we determined upon accompanying
them. On arriving in front of Johnson's house,
where upwards of 400 men, women and children,
were assembled, an inspection was made of the piece
of land where the treasure was said to be, and one
of the constables, having been engaged a few minutes
in turning up the earth, while Johnson and his
family were giving utterance to angry expressions,
aided by a young man named Langshaw (a clerk in
one of the stores in Lucea), who talked about the
rights of property, etc., found a clayed cooking
utensil, called a yabba, and a common water jar,
both of which had been evidently placed in the newly-
excavated earth by Johnson and his associates. At
the discovery of the imposture, a shout of indigna-
tion was raised by some of the assembled people,
and between them and Johnson's family there was a
violent altercation. Upon a gentleman remarking
that the whole affair was a compound of Obeahism,

K

142 OBEAH.

Myalism, and Eevivalism, some of the bystanders
observed, that if the white people had not interfered
the jar and money would have been found. One of
the black lookers-on said, 'The jar began to sink
down as soon as the white people began to trouble
it.' The house of Johnson was afterwards searched
by the constabulary, who took from it blocks and
ropes that Langshaw had supplied for lifting up the
treasure ; and on inquiry being made, the fact was
ascertained that Obeahism had been at work for
several days and nights. We are informed that
three Obeah-men, who were not apprehended at the
time we left Lucea, had received £10 for their ser-
vices, and that for some months past they have had
other and well-paying customers in Lucea, some of
whom are among the most earnest in professions of
Christianity."

The Obeah-man must not be confounded with the
Myalman, who is to the former what the antidote is
to the poison. He professes to undo what the other
has done ; to cure where the other has injured ; but
it must be confessed that, both in its operation and
its results, the cure is often worse than the disease.
In truth, the boundary line between the two classes
of professors is oftentimes but a shadowy one.

Obeah, apparently, is not destined to die an in-
glorious death, — quia caret vate sacro. In 1817, there
was published in London a book, entitled, " Poems,
chiefly on the Superstition of Obeah," — a curious
work, on a curious and far from uninteresting
subject.

XIV.

AMONG THE MANCHESTER MOUNTAINS.

From Chapelton we proceeded to Mandeville, the
principal village — for it is nothing more — of the
parish of Manchester, and one of the healthiest
stations in the island.

Situated in the heart of the Manchester moun-
tains, and about 2000 feet above the level of the
sea, the climate of this pretty little place is almost
European in its character. In the winter months,
the thermometer has been known to register 55°
during the night, and the maximum heat never
exceeds 75° or 80°.

The road ascends through park-like scenery, gra-
dually but unintermittently from Porus, a gloomy
straggling village about ten miles from Mandeville.
Here we first became acquainted with the Manchester
" red dirt," as the negroes call it, — a dark ferruginous
" brick mould," in composition a mixture of iron and
alumina, which persistently covers the whole surface
of the parish.

The change of temperature was very marked as
we ascended the hill.

It was evening when we passed through Porus,

144 AMONG THE MANCHESTER MOUNTAINS.

and we had hardly left it five miles behind us when
we were glad to don our greatcoats and wrap our-
selves up in travelling rugs.

" The sun never rose upon a more picturesque
village than that of Mandeville," says Sewell, who
visited it in I860.1 "It reminded me a little of
a newly located town in an American territory, for
the houses did not look very old, nor were the
streets out of repair, — two exceptions to very general
rules in Jamaica."

To our mind it was more like an English country
village. There was a village green where the school-
boys played cricket j a square-towered white- washed
English village church; a clean little school-house,
and one or two pretty cottages, with patches of
flowers before their doors. There were pastures
divided by stone walls, — a rare sight in this country,
and English-like trees in the common, and cows
browsing underneath their shade.

Here we pitched our tents for some days, taking
up our quarters in one of the cleanest and most com-
fortable lodging-houses which we came across in
Jamaica.

There was a garden too, or rather what had once
been a garden, now a tangled wilderness of trees, and
shrubs and flowers, many of them rare even for the
tropics.

It was pleasant in the morning to look out of your
bedroom window and watch the humming-birds
flitting about amongst the great trumpet-like flowers
1 Ordeal of Free Labour, p. 222.

AMONG THE MANCHESTER MOUNTAINS. 1 45

of the Portlandia, or the scarlet blossoms of the
hibiscus, or the pink clusters of the lilac. Then
there were rich orchids which scented the air of
nights. There was the Holy Ghost plant, with its
pure white petals, shrouding the snowy Dove within.

There was the wax-plant, trailing over the win-
dow frames, flower, stem, and leaves, as if cunningly
formed in wax. There was the spider orchid, grow-
ing upon an old guava tree, and honeysuckle twining
over the pillars of the piazza. Jasmines and frangi-
panis perfumed our sitting-room; and our daily
nosegay was formed of stephanotis and heliotrope, of
gigantic lilies of exquisite hue and delicate odour, of
clove-scented carnations, and Martinique roses.

In the yard were loquat, orange and bread-fruit
trees. The ground was carpeted with the magenta
blossoms of the Tahiti apple ; and a handsome
star-apple tree, with quivering leaves, green on the
upper, bronze on the lower surface, justified the negro
proverb, that " woman deceitful like a 'tar apple
leaf."

The peasantry of Manchester are a prosperous,
contented, and independent race. Many of them
are well off. We were told of one man, who, by
industry and frugality, had accumulated £2000.
Coffee is the principal staple of the parish. It
is calculated that on an average each of the small
settlers makes £80 per annum from his coffee crops.
But grazing farms are numerous, and Manchester
cattle and horses are highly esteemed throughout
the island. There can be little poverty in a district

146 AMONG THE MANCHESTER MOUNTAINS.

where the poorest man owns his patch of land, and
rides to market on his own " beast."

Manchester has always been the head-quarters of
the Moravian Mission in Jamaica, and to the praise-
worthy efforts of the clergy of that denomination is
to be attributed much of the improved social position
of the peasantry in the parish.

One of our first visits was to the Moravian settle-
ment of Fairfield.

We left Mandeville about twelve o'clock. The
morning had been dull and cloudy, with little or no
breeze. But towards mid-day a gentle gale sprang
up, and shortly afterwards the sun shone forth in
unclouded brilliancy. The road for the first few
miles was rough and stony. Eecent rains had worn
it away into deep ruts and spring-breaking holes,
and our carriage-wheels were often impeded by the
luxuriant growth of grass and " bush " which told of
the infrequency of traffic over the solitary highway.
But every tree and rock was clothed with verdure.
Ipomseas dangled from the boughs of the orange
trees. Golden, white, and purple creepers — a mazy
thicket of colour — bordered the road like a hedge.
The night-blowing cereus, with closed, tassel-like
flowers, dragged its fleshy stems over every broken
wall and limestone boulder. By degrees the land-
scape opened, and through the breaks in the bush we
caught glimpses of the far-off sea, misty and hazy in
the distance. Then came a village, with one or two
decent cottages, and a blue-fronted grog-shop. Then

AMONG THE MANCHESTER MOUNTAINS. 147

a few huts, with tiny barbacues and green patches
of coffee. Then the wooden spire of Fairfield church
was seen ; and in a few minutes more we had driven
up to the door of the resident clergyman's house.

From the little grey verandah, festooned with
creepers, into which we were courteously invited to
enter, we could command a magnificent view of the
surrounding country.

Over against us lay the low range of the Santa
Cruz mountains. Through dips in the sky-line to
the right and left of the landscape, we looked down
upon the sea at Black Eiver and Alligator Pond.
Below us, at the foot of Spur Tree Hill, was a wide
and extensive valley, stretching out like yellow
downs when it trended away to the sea, in other
parts green with bright pastures, or black with dark
masses of foliage.

The settlement of Fairfield includes a church, in-
fant, training, and day school. The community pos-
sess about forty-eight acres of land, of which twelve
are in cultivation. The number of communicants
upon the roll is about a thousand. The average
attendance of scholars at the day school is over forty,
and at the infant school about thirty-five. Boys and
girls here receive a sound liberal and Christian edu-
cation. The girls are, in addition, taught sewing,
cookery, and housekeeping. The boys are brought
up to trades or educated as teachers.

We first visited the day school, where the boys
were busy with their copy books. A large blue

148 AMONG THE MANCHESTER MOUNTAINS.

globe, made from the pith of the dagger plant (Yucca
aloifolia, Adam's needle), by a former "brother,"
hung on a framework from the roof of the room.
Close beside it stood the teacher's desk. A shelv-
ing platform with benches for the boys, a clock, a
black board on an easel, a map of Jamaica, and a
drawing of a sugar manufactory, completed the fur-
niture of the apartment. Music is energetically cul-
tivated amongst the pupils, and with surprisingly
good results, considering the unworkable materials
the teachers have to deal with. For the negroes,
impressionable as they are to the influence of music,
are the least musical creatures in creation. A
negress's voice is shriller than the most strident
fife ; a negro's is harsh and wooden. Time and
harmony are beyond the comprehension of either.
A hymn sung by a negro congregation is a race,
where the object of. every one is either to distin-
guish himself by some eccentric performance of his
own on the way, or to reach the goal, the end of the
verse, before his neighbours. But at Fairfield the boys
sang some hymns and part songs with wonderful
effect, and much credit is due to the earnest, fair-
headed German, who laboured assiduously at this
most thankless of tasks.

In the infant school, which we next visited, knots
of tiny children, under the charge of monitors often
smaller than their pupils, were picking out their
letters, or spelling words of one syllable. Here, as
in the day school, we were struck with the excellent

AMONG THE MANCHESTER MOUNTAINS. 149

system which prevailed. Talent was everywhere
encouraged; the brightest and cleverest children
being selected to instruct the more backward, en-
tirely irrespective of age.

The training-school boasts an excellent garden,
neatly and trimly kept by the labour of the students
themselves. The church now in the course of erec-
tion is a handsome stone building, commanding an
exquisite view over sea and valley. And in the
pastures attached to it are some most curious fig-
trees, evidently of great age, whose roots have wound
themselves round and over and in and out the cre-
vices of the limestone boulders.

The very peculiar manner in which social require-
ments are combined with religious duties in the doc-
trine and practice of the Moravian Church of neces-
sity requires a special training for the young mem-
bers of both sexes of that denomination. The
teachers and clergy belonging to the Moravian body
have wives selected for them by lot, and for this
purpose a training-school for young women has been
established at Bethabara near Newport, a little vil-
lage some ten or fifteen miles from Fairfield. Here,
in addition to the sound religious education which
they receive, they are taught house-keeping, cookery,
and other domestic duties. Before a clergyman can
be inducted into a cure he is bound to marry, and
if he loses his wife during his incumbency, he is
either suspended from discharging his priestly duties,
or is removed to some other sphere of usefulness.

150 AMONG THE MANCHESTER MOUNTAINS.

By virtue of her marriage, his wife acquires a certain
sacerdotal character. Clothed like her husband, and
also like the communicants, in white, she administers
the sacrament to the females, whilst her husband
does the like to the males. She is in theory the
mother, and her husband the father, of their flock.
No member of the Moravian Church is entitled to
go to law until he has received the sanction of his
minister, a privilege accorded only after attempts at
an amicable arrangement of the dispute have failed,
or in special cases of grievous wrong, reparable in no
other way.

Our drive home was by Spur-tree and Bulldead.
We mention these places only as instances of the
quaint names which villages and houses in Jamaica
obtain. Looking over a list of properties in an old
almanac, I found amongst the estates such names as
Paradise, Angels, Thrive-well, Heart's-ease, Hog-hole,
Lilliput, Pumpkin-ground, Mount-prosperous, Cow
Park, Trial, Boggetty Hill, Pleasant Hall, Snaky
Hill, Envy Hall, Scholar's Cot, Mount Moses, Poor
Man's Corner, Brumalia, Apropos, Done-at-last, Hob-
son's Choice, Try-see, Grumble Hall, Shot-over,
Come-see, Iter Boreale, Puckle-church, Fat-hog-Quar-
ter, Save-rent, Slippery Gut, Millennium Hall, Eun-
ning Gut, Purling Stream, Shoes and Stockings,
and Y. S. A stream in Manchester goes by the
name of the One-stick-over-the-one-eye River. A
well-known village in the Maroon was called " Me
no sen', you no come." At the present day every

AMONG THE MANCHESTER MOUNTAINS. 151

negro settlement is either a Comfort or a Con-
tent, a Friendship or a Providence, a Prospect
or a Eetirement. Happy Huts, Pleasant Groves,
Cheerful Gardens, Harmony Penns, Golden Vales,
Fruitful Mounts, Unity Valleys, and Cherry Banks,
abound ; and the more wild and desolate the situa-
tion, the more jocund and cheery its name.

XV.

THE ST. ELIZABETH PLAINS.

The Creoles have a prejudice, which they do not
attempt to explain, against travelling by night. But
immediately after second cock-crow1 is no uncommon
hour for starting, especially when the day's journey
is likely to be a long one. Once or twice we were
fain to adopt this practice, and it must be confessed
that the extra exertion which it involved brought
with it its own reward.

The cool, often chilly, morning air, the deserted
roads, the calm and quiet of surrounding nature
— with " the full fair moon " shining overhead, and
the harmless lightning playing around — had all
an indescribable charm of their own. And the
many romantic scenes through which these morning
drives led me have left an impression upon my mind
which will not readily be effaced. Now the road
wound through a wild savanna — prolific in naught
but wire-grass — its wide desert-like expanse broken
only by a few stunted guava bushes ; now we were
passing a negro village half hidden by the dense

1 The negroes say that cocks crow thrice during the night— at
10 p.m. ; 1 a.m. ; and 4 a.m.

THE ST. ELIZABETH PLAINS. 153

growth of brushwood around it ; now travelling
under an avenue of magnificent trees, through whose
leafy roof the moonbeams in vain struggled for ad-
mittance. The graceful and varied character of the
foliage cannot fail to be remarked by all travellers
in the tropics. The feathery tufts of the bamboo,
the dotted outline of the logwood, the coral-like
branches of the calabash, the large palmate leaf of the
bread-fruit, and the glossy arc-like arms of the cocoa-
nut palm, never appeared to me so beautiful as when
seen en profile against the morning sky, or when form-
ing part of the walls of such an avenue as that which
I have described.

But nothing struck me so much in these morning
journeys as the extraordinary stillness that seemed
to fall upon all nature just before dawn. Not a
sound was to be heard except the monotonous tramp
of your horse's feet. The shrill song of the grass-
hopper, the quick sharp chirp of the cricket, and the
hoarse croaking of the bull-frog, — all had ceased.

By degrees the day began to break. First, a faint
brightness was seen in the eastern sky ; then a flush
of rosy light dawned on the landscape. The dark
blue-black night-clouds sank down in heavy masses
below the horizon. The moon paled — one solitary
star retaining its brilliancy long after its neighbours
had disappeared. A gentle twittering of birds was
heard; a white screech-owl flew shrieking across
the path ; and then uprose the glorious sun, and it
was day once more.

Such an early start as that which I have described

154 THE ST. ELIZABETH PLAINS.

we made on the day that we left Mandeville for the
parish of St. Elizabeth's. And here we may in pass-
ing state that a parish in Jamaica is of the nature
of a county in England. It has its separate com-
mission of the peace, its custos rotulorum, clerk of
petty session, clerk of the parish board, collector of
taxes, clerk of the parochial road board, coroner and
rector j and a circuit court is held in its principal
town or village. The whole island is divided into
fourteen parishes not very unequal in population,
and, with the exception of the city and parish of
Kingston, not very unequal in area.1 The parish of
St. Elizabeth's, with which we are now about to
make aquaintance, has an area of 448 square miles,
and had, in 1864, a population of 37,777 souls.
By the time that

11 Phoebus had sprung frae Thetis' lap,
The hills with rays adorning,"

we were well-nigh at the top of Watson's hill, one of
those steep inclines — it can hardly be called a road
— made for descent rather than for ascent, by which
the inhabitants of the mountain regions gain access
to the plains below.

We could detect a marked difference in the charac-
ter of the surrounding vegetation. The little Pal-
metto palm, with which the negroes thatch their
houses, and whose leaves the negresses use as um-
brellas on their journeys, was common. So also was
the Mountain Cabbage (Areca oleracea), waving its

1 Governor Grant's Report on the State of the Colony, for 1867.
24th October 1868.

THE ST. ELIZABETH PLAINS. 155

graceful form, like a tall Corinthian pillar, often
150 feet high above the encircling foliage. Its
pith, as it is popularly called, chou de palmiste, as the
French term it, is perhaps the most delicate vegetable
in the tropics. In a country where oysters grow on
trees, and crabs burrow in the woods, we need not
be surprised to hear that cabbages are cut with an
axe. Such is the case with the Areca. The taking
of the cabbage, as with all the palm tribe, kills the
tree. The roads were bordered with a flower-fence of
Barbadoes pride (Poinciana pulcherrima), or in negro
idiom, "doodle-doo; " and over its pea-covered stems
twined the liquorice vine (Abrus precatorius), whose
scarlet and black spotted seeds (" John Crow or
Jumby beads ") are well known in this country as
necklaces. There, too, trailed the Circassian bean
(Adenanthera Pavonina), whose seeds are said to be so
constantly uniform in weight, that jewellers in the
East Indies employ them as weights ; and the Jeru-
salem thorn, which is popularly supposed to be the
plant with which our Saviour was crowned.

On reaching the level we passed Littets', a Mora-
vian station, with a good church, as all these
settlements have. The road here was very uninter-
esting for a mile or two. The soil was dry and
sandy. Great quantities of a kind of willow covered
the plains, and at rare intervals a seaside grape-tree
or two (Coccoloba uvifera), whose wood is admirably
suited for wood-engraving, and whose fruit makes
excellent tarts.

It was too early in the morning to see many signs

156 THE ST. ELIZABETH PLAINS. .

of life. Once we passed a cart with the motto
" Trust to God, my friend ! " painted in bright letters
on its sides, driven by

" A somewhat pottle-bodied boy,"
and carrying in it an aged woman, like the negro's
pig, " little, but very old." Then a party of Coolies
came tramping by, the women bedecked with orna-
ments, with gold pins stuck in their noses, and, in
the upper lobes of their ears, ear-rings so heavy that
the ear was pulled down by their weight, rings on
their fingers, necklaces round their thick dusky
throats, half-a-dozen bracelets on each arm, and
bangles round each arm ankle.

A little above Littets', we commenced the ascent
of the Santa Cruz hills. For the next ten miles the
journey was a constant ascent. The roads were for-
tunately capital, and the views of the sea, from vari-
ous points, exquisite. From Torrington we could
look down over all the St. Elizabeth plains, and far
away in the distance, covered with a sunny haze,
stretched the green cane-pieces and fertile fields of
verdant Westmoreland.

At the little village of Malvern, we passed a shoe-
maker's shed, from whose sign-board we copied the
following inscription :

" I'm a maker of boots and shoes,
No man's work will I refuse,
My work is good, my price is just :
Excuse me, my friend, I cannot trust."

Here we stopped for breakfast, and were intro-
duced for the first time to the famous Avocado or

THE ST. ELIZABETH PLAINS. 157

Alligator pear (Persea gratissima). This celebrated
vegetable is the correct accompaniment of " 'pose-
upon " * (as the negroes call salt fish), and is an ex-
cellent substitute for fresh butter. The story is told
of an irascible old planter, who nearly dismissed a
book-keeper upon his estate for eating butter at
breakfast, during the pear season : " for a man who
can do that," he growled out, " upon the wages I give
him, cannot possibly be honest." The Alligator
pear is also eaten as a fruit, mixed with sugar and
wine. The seeds contain a large quantity of tannin.
A cloth stretched over them and pricked with a pin
may be marked as indelibly as with the best mark-
ing ink.

Eesuming our journey in the cool of the evening,
we left the buggy to follow, and rode down to the
foot of the hill. Mango trees of all kinds, laden
with fruit, became common — from the humble " tur-
pentine" to the proud "No. 11." The " sea-loving
cocoa-nut " waved its quivering leaves, and by its
crooked, wind-bent stems, illustrated the negro say-
ing, " as uncommon as a straight cocoa-nut." St.
Elizabeth, as a parish, is famous for its mangoes and
its palms. Manchester, on the other hand, has little
to boast of, except its coffee and its oranges.

As we were driving along the sea-shore, just
before entering the bustling little town of Black

1 "Pose-upon " means " impose upon," and salt fish is a univer-
sal stand-by in Jamaica. With these facts belore him, we leave
the reader to ferret out the signification of this quaint expression
for himself.

L

158 THE ST. ELIZABETH PLAINS.

River, we met one of the old-fashioned " kittereens," a
vehicle once universal in Jamaica, and still known,
we believe, in some outlandish districts in Cornwall.
It was a queer, high-bodied gig, with an umbrella
fixed on the top of a pole by way of a hood. There
was little protection from the sun in a covering of
that description.

As we were wondering at this old-world turn-out,
the nut of a sand-bag tree, expanded with the heat,
burst with a loud explosion.

" Warra ! " cried Bob, nearly jumping from his
driving box, " what for debbil shoot pistol to kill
poor nigger so 1 "

The rest of our day's " travel " was accomplished
without either accident or incident. We drove into
Black River when the sun was setting, and here we
remained for the night. The wharf was crowded
with logwood, out of which the Jew speculators of
the enterprising little place were just then making
enormous fortunes.

As we were smoking our after-dinner cigars, lean-
ing over the old wooden bridge which here spans
the Black River, we saw a dull, black mass sailing
slowly up stream. It was, as we suspected, an alli-
gator. Forthwith the Creole friend who accom-
panied us launched out into "alligator stories,"
which had at least the merit of being horrible, to
render them interesting in our eyes. He told us
how one day an alligator carried off the calf of a
poor woman, which was browsing peaceably by the
side of its mother. The woman called for assist-

THE ST. ELIZABETH PLAINS. 159

ance, and succeeded in bringing an old fisherman,
who was hauling in his lines at some little distance,
to her help. When the man came up he found the
cow busily engaged in butting the alligator. Cut-
ting a stiff bamboo pole, the man rushed to the
rescue, and succeeded in killing the alligator by
shoving the pole down its throat. On another occa-
sion an alligator attacked a woman who was cross-
ing the sands on horseback, and tore out the horse's
entrails. But such occurrences are rare. The alli-
gator is fully more frightened for the human race
than they need be for it.

Jamaica possesses nearly a hundred rivers, but of
these only two are navigable, the Black River, in
St. Elizabeth's, and the Cabarita, in Westmoreland.
" On these streams flat-bottomed boats and canoes
bring produce from the upper plains to the sea. The
other rivers subserve the purposes of mill econonry,
but are rarely rendered available for irrigation." *

The whole parish of St. Elizabeth's, with the single
exception of that portion of it which embraces the
Santa Cruz mountains, is one dead level, broken up
by lagoons and marshes when it approaches the sea,
but singularly devoid of streams. Indeed, but for
the slow-flowing streams of the Black River, it might
be described as waterless. Tank water is therefore
largely employed for domestic purposes.

The prevalence of extensive plains on the south
side of the island, and the short course of the rivers
on the north side, has been often noticed.
1 Transactions of the Jamaica Royal Society of Arts, 1855, p. 27.

160 THE ST. ELIZABETH PLAINS.

In the level " downs " of St. Elizabeth, life is less
rapid, less intense than in more hilly regions. Nature
is not dead, but asleep. The rivers flow with less
rapid pace ; the breezes blow with less reviving
energy ; the heat is greater ; the vegetation less
varied; even the birds of the air sweep over the
tract of heaven with dull and hebetate wing.

In the great savanna of St. Elizabeth's resides a
curious colony of blacks whose origin has puzzled
most travellers. They go by the name of Paratees,
and build their huts in the little clumps of bush with
which the plain is dotted. They have no religion,
no tradition ; they are extremely shy, and shun the
society of, or even intercourse with, white men.
From their long coarse hair, their narrow almond-
shaped eyes (not round and bull-eyed, like those of
the negroes), and thin well-chiselled, though broad-
lobed noses, it is supposed that they are of Indian
origin. Parchment is a common name amongst them,
— a word which contains the prefix Para, which is
also found in Paratee. Although they marry out of
their own tribe, such marriages are not liked amongst
them. They form a curious and by no means unin-
teresting problem to the ethnologist.

Black River has the reputation of being one of
the most unhealthy towns in Jamaica. The heat is
intense, and I shall not readily forget the wretched
night I spent there, in a curtainless bed, eaten up
by mosquitoes, and maddened almost to fever pitch
by the monotonous break of the sea upon the sandy
beach. I was suffering from chigoes, too, a little

THE ST. ELIZABETH PLAINS. 161

flea which burrows beneath the flesh of your foot,
causing you infinite irritation. One felt he could
appreciate, to its fullest extent, Sydney Smith's
account of the insect miseries of tropical countries :
— " Insects are the curse of tropical climates. The
bete rouge lays the foundation of a tremendous ulcer.
In a moment you are covered with ticks. Chigoes
bury themselves in your flesh, and hatch a large
colony of young chigoes in a few hours. They will
not live together ; but every chigoe sets up a sepa-
rate ulcer, and has his own private portion of pus.
Flies get entry into your mouth, into your eyes, into
your nose ; you eat flies, drink flies, and breathe flies.
Lizards, cockroaches, and snakes get into your bed ;
ants eat up the books ; scorpions sting you on the
foot. Everything bites, stings, or bruises. Every
second of your existence you are wounded by some
piece of animal life, that nobody has ever seen before
but Swammerdam or Meriam. An insect with eleven
legs is swimming in your tea-cup; a nondescript
with nine wings is struggling in the small beer ; or
a caterpillar, with several dozen eyes in his belly,
is hastening over the bread and butter ! All nature
is alive, and seems to be getting all her entomo-
logical host to eat you up as you are standing, out
of your coat, waistcoat, and breeches ! Such are
the tropics ! All this reconciles us to our dens, bogs,
vapours, and drizzle ; to our apothecaries rushing
about with gargle and tincture ; to our old British
constitutional coughs, sore throats, and swelled
faces."

XVI

IN BLUEFIELDS BAY.

Our next " station " was the little fishing hamlet
of Bluefields, in the parish of Westmoreland, on the
bay of the same name, once an old Spanish station
by the name of Oristana, at the Buff1 or Great
House of which Gosse resided while studying the
natural history of the island.

Here we spent some days, occupying the cool of
the mornings and of the evenings in exploring the
neighbourhood and becoming acquainted with its
local peculiarities. One of these was a negro village
called New Broughton, whose houses were built on
stakes some three or five feet from the ground.
Another was the verdant pastures of Guinea-grass 2
with which the whole parish abounds. Few more
refreshing sights greet the traveller's eye in his jour-
neys throughout the island than a bright field of

1 Buff, contraction for "above." The Great House or Mansion
house of an estate is generally situated on a little hill ; hence the
name.

2 Guinea-grass was introduced into Jamaica in 1744. The seed
came as food for some birds sent from Africa as a present to the
then Chief Justice. The birds dying, the seed was thrown away.

— West India Sketch Book, vol. ii. p. 9. London, 1834.

IN BLUEFIELDS BAY. 163

this valuable grass, often five or six feet high, with
the passing sea breeze sweeping over it like a wave,
and bending its lofty stems with gentle undulatory
motion.

A third of the local peculiarities of this district
was the number and variety of birds we fell in with.
Flocks of green parrots and yellow canaries flew over
our heads. Little ground doves, quails, and part-
ridges hopped across the path. The red-throated
woodpecker crept up the high trees. Black and
golden banana birds, two-penny chicks, and mock-
ing-birds, flitted out and into the mysterious re-
cesses of the bush. The old-man bird, with its long
tail and slow solemn flight, every now and then
appeared from out the branches of the cedar trees.
The Barbadoes blackbird, with its white glassy eye,
occupied its leisure hours in picking the ticks from
the backs of the cattle feeding on the pasture. Pouch-
billed pelicans swept over the blue bay. Boobies sat
in wise conclave on the rock-ledges of " the caves."

In the early morning the swallows and martens
flew shrieking over the roof of the house. During
the day the little picaflors (humming-birds) with
hurried "twittering" flight fluttered round the scarlet
blossoms of the shoeblack (Hibiscus) ; and of nights,
when the sun was down and the thick dew was
falling, a weird old owl flew out of her nest on the
high cotton-tree, and roamed hither and thither over
the pasture in search of food for her screaming pro-
geny.

At dinner time, too, we could always reckon upon

164 IN BLUEFIELDS BAY.

a plentiful game course. Bald-pates, white-wings,
and pea-doves were never wanting. Duck and teal
came to us from the neighbouring ponds; the Ja-
maica ortolan (Motacilla) from the pastures ; and once
or twice a stray negro from Maroon land, across the
verdure-covered hills to the back of the house,
brought us a wild Guinea-fowl or a ring-tail pigeon,
of all game in Jamaica the most delicate and the
most prized. The larger birds we generally shot
ourselves ; for the smaller ones we were indebted to
the little negro boys who caught them in springs
called " calabans," baited with peas or pulse.

Underneath our house was a burn of crystal water,
in which every evening our negro servant set his
fish-pot for cray-fish and mountain mullet. His
" pot " was a bamboo basket with a hole to admit
of the entrance of the fish ; and the bait was a Seville
orange cut in two. Each morning when he went
" to search it " he brought back with him, besides
his piscatory spoil,

" A cheap and wholesome salad from the brook,"

in the shape of water-cresses, which in the exhaust-
ing heat were most grateful.

What recked it though we got beef but once a
week, and mutton only when some neighbouring
proprietor chose to sacrifice a sheep, if we could feast
on hicatee (land-turtle) and black crab, and fare
sumptuously every day on bisque h Vhrivisse and
turtle-fin1? To wash down all these delicacies we
had penn punch, which seemed to consist mainly of
brandy and cherry brandy, main sheet, sangaree,

IN BLUEFIELDS BAY. 105

man dram, and a host of " beverages " of which not
the least acceptable was sweetened lime-juice and
water, with just a soupcon of nutmeg and perhaps
a teaspoonful of old rum to qualify the whole. Truly
we rose from every meal with grateful hearts and
could with unction repeat the negro grace,

" Tank you, me fader, fe all me na swallow,
Hope me may lib, fe nyam smo' (to eat some more)
to-marrow."

One fine afternoon we paid a visit to an old
worker in tortoise-shell, who lived about half a mile
from the hamlet. He was a respectable mulatto man
with silvery hair and whiskers, and an exceedingly
sweet expression of countenance. He kept a little
roadside store ; but beyond a couple of dozen bottles
of beer and a box of country cigars, his stock-in-trade
seemed none of the largest. One side of his tiny
cottage was hung round with saws and files of all
sorts and sizes — the instruments of his craft. He
was suffering from inflammation of the eye, caused by
the dust raised in working the shell. He told us
that of all the fine species of sea-turtle known in
Jamaica, the hawk's-bill turtle was the only one
whose shell was of any value. A single shell would
weigh about four or five pounds, and was sold from
eight to ten shillings a pound. The fisher people
shell the turtle after death by laying it on its back
over a hot fire, when it scales off. The Spaniards of
the Main, more cruel, not unfrequently shell it whilst
still living and then let it go. Dark thick tortoise-
shell is esteemed the best. The mode of working it

166 IN BLUEFIELDS BAY.

is to wash it over with water and ashes, and then
polish it with charcoal and olive oil. It can then
be moulded to any form by the action of heat.

We subsequently visited a turtle " crawl " in Shef-
field Bay. It was a little fenced-in enclosure under-
neath some mangrove trees. Four green turtles were
swimming about, preparatory to being sold to the
trading-vessels at the neighbouring town of Savanna-
la-Mar. The usual price is from threepence to four-
pence a pound. In very plentiful seasons it some-
times goes down to twopence. " From the time the
turtle is deposited on board the vessel conveying it
from Jamaica to the day it reaches England, it re-
ceives no food whatever. In sailing vessels this
starvation continues for seven weeks; in steamers
probably only nineteen days. In many vessels the
poor turtles lie upon their backs the entire voyage,
with nothing but a wet swab under their heads, it
being the business of the ship's loblolly boy to wipe
from their frothy mouths the accumulation of mucus
that clots around them (as thrown off from their
diseased lungs), and to clean away from their glassy
eyes that deposit of slimy film which would other-
wise become a concrete mass, and blind this bar-
barously treated delicacy for the banquets of the
wealthy. So fraught with loss of life is this abomin-
able treatment that it is no unfrequent occurrence
for a sailing vessel taking in fifty head of turtle to
lose thirty or forty on the homeward passage. By
steamer (seldom carrying more than twenty-five head)
the percentage of death is little in comparison but

IN BLUEFIELDS BAY. 167

the barbarity of prolonged starvation is the same,
only less intensified by the difference between the
length of voyage." l

Of the various species of turtle which are known
in Jamaica, — the green turtle, the hawk's-bill, the
mulatto or yellow turtle, the trunk, and the Macongo,
the green is the only kind sold as food. The inferior
sorts are eaten by the fisher-folk alone. It is, besides,
the largest. The average weight of a full-grown
green turtle is about 400 lbs. There was a Macongo
turtle caught at Negril in 1843, which weighed a ton,
produced a whole barrel of oil, and took nine men to
turn over. " A turtle does not reach its true per-
fection of flavour, its growth of fat, its development of
gelatine, its mature proportion of calipee, its breadth
of calipash, its unctuosity of fins, its true piquancy
of richness and ' noblesse de gout * until it has achieved
the weight of 230 lbs., or over."2 But as regards
the fish sent home to this country, " no captain will
purchase a turtle weighing over 120 lbs., as no mature
fish would stand the starvational treatment"2 which
we have detailed. As an article of diet turtle is in
high repute all over the West Indies. Turtle steak,
turtle fins stewed, turtle liver, turtle tripe, and above
all turtle eggs, are delicacies which it is almost worth
while taking a voyage to Jamaica to procure.

The turtle, for all its apparent apathy, is one of
the most cunning of fish, and to capture him requires
all the fisherman's skill. When his "lair" has once

1 Handbook of the Kingston Preserved Turtle Company, p. 9.
By S. Levien. 2 Ibid. p. 10.

1G8 IN BLUEFIELDS BAY.

been discovered, the fisherman watches his oppor-
tunity, and when the turtle is absent in search of
food spreads a square net over the spot. As soon as
the turtle returns the net is pulled up. But often a
fish will dodge his hunter for months. An old boat-
man told me of one that had taken him ten years to
catch !

Despite the burning, sickening heat of the day,
and the violent " norths " which seemed to shake our
cottage to pieces at night, our stay at Bluefields was
of a very enjoyable nature. Often in the cool tropi-
cal evenings, with their dove-coloured " quaker" skies,
we would go orchid-hunting amongst the mangrove
trees on the shore, wandering over the white sandy
beach covered with pieces of sponge and fragments
of broken coral for hours together. Often, too, would
we go canoeing in the bay, learning from our coloured
boatman all about the various " schools" offish which
haunted the bay, and picking up much quaint infor-
mation about the habits and customs and supersti-
tions of the fisher-folk. Our canoe (the Indian
piragua) was about eleven feet long, and was made
as usual out of a single cotton tree. Closely packed
— two on each bench — sixteen or seventeen persons
could be accommodated in it. It could carry from
seventeen to eighteen hundredweight of goods : and
with proper care would last ten years. Our head-
boatman boasted of it as the safest kind of boat in
the world, and said he could bring a canoe safe to
land in the stormiest weather.

The fishing season lasts from June to September ;

IN BLUEFIELDS BAY. 169

the deep-sea fishing from March to May. The ordi-
nary methods of fishing are with the line and with
the seine net. A seine with its two accompanying
canoes costs about £50.

Another mode of fishing is with the " palenka."
This is " a line of almost interminable length, with
any number of hooks affixed to it by other small
lines. A common number is three. The largest has
550 hooks on it, at 2| yards apart, which gives
nearly a mile in length of fishing line. By a most
ingenious arrangement of a cork pad all round a large
basket, each hook is inserted in rotation into it, while
the line to which each hook is joined is coiled in the
basket itself. As each hook is cast into the sea it is
baited with pieces of fish, and then the three lines being
joined — fancy the labour of paying out three miles
of fishing line, with 1650 hooks at 2| yard intervals
— the end of the line being fixed to heavy stakes
driven into the sea bottom, and the whereabout of
the stakes only discoverable in the dark and deep of
the night by the spring alarm-bells affixed to them.
At times the catches are very remunerative, varying
with palenkas of the quantity of hooks stated, from
four to fourteen dollars. At times not even a dollar's
worth is caught."1 " Ebry day," says the negro
proverb, " fishing day, but ebry day no fe catch fish."

Still yet another mode of fishing is with the

" bateau," an open kind of punt made of branches of

trees loosely nailed together, in which the fisher squats,

dropping his line over the bows of his uncouth skiff.

1 County Union newspaper, November 19, 1870.

170 IN BLUEFIELDS BAY.

and with the aid of a paddle no bigger than a cricket
bat shifting his position from place to place.

Hand nets are sometimes used for shore fishing.
The fisherman wades in up to his neck, then with a
dexterous twist above his head casts his net, stand-
ing motionless in the water till he thinks it is filled.

Of all the strange creatures that swim the Carib-
bean Sea perhaps the strangest is the Manatee or
Sea-Cow, or as the negroes call it the Mananty. They
are very common in these parts. Upwards of thir-
teen had been seen within the last two years between
Black Eiver and Savanna-la-Mar. Popular tradition
derives its name from certain fins or flappers near
the throat resembling hands. It has a head like an
ox, a thick bull-like neck, and a body like a seal ;
and specimens have been caught from ten to fifteen
feet long. It is a timid gentle animal, frightened at
the slightest noise and endowed with a remarkably
quick sense of hearing. The negroes believe that if
you once manage to get up to it, it will allow you to
strike its back ! It is caught either in the seine
or with the harpoon when asleep. It has a little
piece of very fine ivory in each ear which is often
stolen by the fishermen ; and its bones are used to
make knife-handles. The flesh is delicious, in some
parts resembling pork, in others beef. A spendid
"round of beef" can be cut from under the belly.

Another monster of the deep is the sea-devil, which
frequently weighs a ton ; and the sea-pike, the fiercest
fish that swims, which possesses a dorsal fin, which
when attacked it raises up, inflicting a heavy back-
handed blow. -

IN BLUEFIELDS BAY. 171

The Sucking-Fish (Remora) is often caught but is
not eaten. It is only " cured," that is, dried in the
sun, and kept as a curiosity. In the early days of
the Spanish conquest, the remora used to be em-
ployed by the Indians of Jamaica as falconers em-
ploy hawks. It was regularly kept, fed and tamed
for the purpose. " The owner on a calm morning
carried it out to sea, secured to his canoe by a small
but strong line many fathoms in depth. The mo-
ment the remora saw a fish in the water, though at
a great distance, it started away with the swiftness
of an arrow and fastened upon it. The Indian, in
the meantime, let go the line which was provided
with a buoy that kept on the surface of the sea, and
served to mark the course which the fish had taken.
This course the Indian pursued in his canoe, until
he conceived that his game was nearly exhausted.
Then taking up the buoy, he gradually drew the line
towards the shore ; the remora still adhering to its
prey with inflexible tenacity. " By this method,"
says Ovedo, ' I have known a turtle caught of bulk
and weight that no single man could support.' " 1

Much more quaint lore about the king-fish and
the Barracouta, the amber-jack and the horse-eye
Carvallhy, the grouper, the black snapper, the old
wife, the mud-fish and the parrot-fish, did we glean
from our negro boatmen. Many a wild song, such
as

" 0 my merry Cadoosa,
What for, you lub man so ? "

1 Dallas's History of the Maroons, vol. i. p. 84,

172 IN BLUEFIELDS BAY.

did they sing for our delectation. And when we
dismissed them with a little extra largesse "to
sweeten their mouths," to use their own phrase,
their gratitude and bouquet d'Afrique were both alike
overpowering.

The drive between Bluefields and Savanna-la-Mar,
the chief town of Westmoreland, was, at least for the
first half the way, exceedingly beautiful. We passed
two or three picturesque little fishing villages, bur-
rowing under over-hanging cliffs, or buried under
broad-leaved plantains and bananas. From the honey-
combed rocks by the seashore hung long withes
with flat glossy leaves. In the yard of one of the
negro huts we noticed a large Jaca-tree (Artocarpus
integrifolia) whose strange noduled fruit, which
weighs sometimes sixty or seventy pounds, grows
out of its stem. Close by, twining round a cotton
tree, whose sap and substance it had utterly de-
stroyed, was a wild fig (Ficus Indica) ; a state of
things which in Jamaica is taken as a type of " the
Scotchman hugging the Creole to death." Near by
it, depended a lovely creeper with brown velvety
pods, whose tempting clusters we were about to
pluck, when we were suddenly arrested by a loud
exclamation from Bob.

" Cracious ! " cried he, " if you touch dis ting, I
don't know what I will have to do with you. I will
hab to get hot hashes " (he meant ashes) " an' put
you into dem."

It was the Cow-itch, a plant well known in the
pharmacopoeia of the old brown women of Jamaica as

IN BLUEFIELDS BAY. 173

an electuary, the silky setce of whose pods produce an
irritation which covers the body with fearful ulcers
and sores.

A little further on we met a child carrying a long
bamboo on her head, filled with water from a neigh-
bouring stream — a plan which Bob pronounced to
be superior to all the buckets and calibashes in the
colony, and which he described as being " as easy as
kiss my hand."

At Savanna-la-Mar we were delayed some little
time to have certain repairs done to buggy. Our
indefatigable Bob proved himself of great service on
the occasion, driving in bolts, screwing up nuts and
actually painting our broken wheel, as if he were to
the manner born.

" Why, Bob ! " we said, " we never knew you were
Bo good a painter!"

" Me can't paint ! " he exclaimed in a tone of
indignant surprise. " Me can't paint ! After my
grandmother's husban' was a painter, me can't
paint ! "

This, of course, was conclusive, at least in his
eyes. We have already alluded to our " sable and
sensuous Sambo's " partiality for dress. Whilst here
an incident occurred which amusingly illustrated his
predilection for " talky-talky " boots. His shoes
having, unlike the Israelites', worn out in his travels,
he contracted with a shoemaker in the town to make
another pair. But alas ! when they were sent home
he found that the faithless tradesman had omitted to
put " criers " into them, although he had paid him
M

174 IN BLUEFIELDS BAY.

half-a-crown extra for this luxury ; and it was with
the greatest difficulty that we could retain him from
taking out proceedings against him under a local
statute called the Tradesman's Act. He wrote him
a letter however, demanding repayment of the two
and sixpence ; and as a specimen of a negro dunning
epistle we now give our readers the benefit of its
perusal.

" Sav.-le-Mar.
Ap rile the 18, 1871.
" Mr. Read, Sir, — I wich to know if you is not in
tend to pay me that small amount. I will like to
know from you for I think you will have to pay it
befor the Mejistrat. I am you Bob ."

From this point we made our way slowly round
the island, returning to Kingston in time to avoid
the May " seasons," ominous symptoms of which had
already begun to shew themselves. And from thence
one fine morning in spring, as beautiful as that on
which we had first seen " the Queen of the Antilles,"
we embarked for England, carrying with us none but
pleasant recollections of our sojourn in Jamaica.

APPENDIX.

NEGRO PROVERBS.

Alligator lay egg, but him no fowl.
Ants follow fat.

Bad family better dan empty pigstye.

Before dog go widout him supper, him eat cockroach.

Beggar beg from beggar neber get rich.

Behind dog it is " dog ; " behind dog it is " mister dog."

Better belly fe (to) bust dan good ting fe spoil.

Better fe fowl say " dog dead," dan fe dog say "fowl dead."

Big blanket make man sleep late.

Black dog (a small coin) buy trouble, hundred poun' no

clear him.
Bragging ribber neber drown somebody (anybody).
Brown man's wife eat cockroach in a corner.
Buckra work neber done.
Bull horn neber too heavy for him head.

Cane no grow like grass.

Cashew neber bear guava.

Cedarboard laugh after dead man. (In Jamaica coffins are

always made of the boards of the cedar-tree.)
Cock mout' (mouth) kill cock.
Cockroach neber in de right before fowl. (An allusion to

fowls' habit of eating cockroaches.)

176 NEGRO PROVERBS.

Cockroach eber so drunk, him no walk past fowl-yard."^
"Come, see me" is noting; but, "come, lib wi' me" is

someting.
Cornful (scornful) dog nyam (eats) dutty [dirty] pudding.
Cotton -tree neber so big but lily (little) axe cut him.
" Cousin Fowl " boil good soup.
Coward man keep whole bones.
Crooked pass (road) hard fe find.
Cry-cry (crying) pickny (child) neber hab him right.
Cubbitch (covetous) for one plum, you lose de whole bunch.
Cuss-cuss (calling names) no bore hole in my skin.
Cuss-cuss no kill John Crow.
Cutacoo (wallet) on man back no yerry (hear) what him

massa yerry.
Cunny (cunning) better dan 'trong (strength).

Dead (death) better dan punish (punishment).
De rope you pulling no de one I cutting.
De tune you playing no de one I dancing.
Do fe do (tit for tat) no harm.
Do fe do make Guinea nigger come a' Jamaica.
Dog no eat dog.

Dog say, sooner dan buy nankeen f e sixpence him would give
doubloon fe bone.
I Duppy (ghost) know who him frighten.)

Ebry day da fishing day, but ebry day no fe catch fish.
Ebry dog know him dinner time. -
Ebry haul of de net no catch June fish.
Ebry victual fe eat, no ebry story fe talk.

Fat don't feel. "

Finger neber say, " Look here ; " him say, " Look dere."

Fisherman neber say him fish 'tink (stink).

Follow fashion break monkey neck.

Fowl neber lick (beat) him own chicken too hot.*

Full belly tell hungry belly " Take heart ! "

NEGRO PROVERBS. 177

Goat say, him hab wool ; sheep say, him hab hair.

Good friend better dan money in de pocket.

Good me do, tank you me get. > (This is bitter negro irony.)

Goramighty no lub ugly.

Greedy (greed) choke puppy.

Greedy puppy neber fat.

Hab money, hab friend.

Hand da bowl, knife da troat (throat).

Hand full, hand come.

Hard-eye (wilful) pickny neber go good.

Hog run for him life ; dog run for him character.

Hot needle burn thread.

Hungry belly an' belly full no travel same pass (road).

Hungry fowl wake soon.

Hungry (hunger) make monkey blow fire.

If any one hate you, him gib you basket fe carry water,

but if you cleber (clever) you put plantain leaf in him (it).
If foot miss pass (the road), him can find him, if mout' miss

pass him no can find him.
If Mr. Go-'way no come, Mr. Dead will come.^
If you see a fippence, you know how dollar is made.
If you want fe lick ole woman pot, you scratch him back.

John Crow neber make house till rain corner
John Crow tink him own pickny white. — •
John Crow say him de dandy man when him hab so-so
fedder (feathers). -

Left man cocoa (a man's leavings) stick to your belly rib.

Lie worse dan sore.

Lily (little) crab-hole spoil big race horse.'

Lily water kill big fire.

Lizard neber plant corn, but him hab plenty.

Man can't smoke an' whistle one time.
Man eber so hearty, dead day watch him.

178 NEGRO PROVERBS.

Man help tief (thief) to-day, 'noder time him help watch-
man.
Man no trabel, him no know puss hab cock-eye (squint).
Man sleep in fowl nest, but fowl nest no him bed.
Man talk plenty, him pay him fader debt.
Maugre (thin) plantain better dan none at all.
Mean man go a' market two time.
Misfortune neber throw cloud.
Monkey no trus' (not to be trusted).
Monkey pickny neber walk on ground.
Mout' say " No," Will say " Yes."

Nanny goat neber scratch him back till him see wall. -^

Neber call centipede names.

Neber make goat trustee for bread-nut tree.

No catchie, no habie.-^

No ebry ting you yerry good fe talk."

No fe want of tongue make cow no talk.

No let mudfish tail touch water.

No mind make ship run ashore.

No make one donkey choke you?*-

No trow away dirty water before you hab clean.

Nyam-nyam (eating) will fill belly, but breeze no fill gut.

Nyam some, leave some tink on to-morrow.

Old fire-stick no hard fe catch.

One daddy fe twenty pickny, but twenty pickny no fe one

daddy.
One finger can't catch louse.
One tief no like to see 'noder tief carry long bag.

Packy (a small calabash) neber bear pumpkin.
Parson christen him own pickny first.*'-
Patience make sick man drink water-gruel.
Patience man ride jackass. —

Pickny will nyam Ma (his mother), but ma no nyam
pickny.

NEGRO PROVERBS. 179

Play wid monkey, no play wi' him tail.

Play wi' puppy, puppy lick you face.^

Play-stone kill bird.

Poor pasture make sheep shabby.

Poor neber sorry fe himself.

Puss know him four o'clock (dinner hour). ^

Put me down softly, me a cracked plate.

Quattie bread (a three-halfpenny loaf) fill monkey belly.

Rain neber fall a' one man door.

Bfttta (rat) cunny (cunning), so when puss gone him make

merry.
Rockatone (stone) at ribber-bottom (bottom of the river)

no know sun hot.

Saftly (softly) saftly catch monkey.

Salt neber say himself sweet.

Sensa (sensible) chicken no cry fe fader, him cry fe food,

because, if him hab food, him hab fader.
Seven year no 'nough fe wash speckle off Guinea-hen back.
Sharp spur make maugre horse cut caper.
Shut mout' no catch fly.
Sheep an' goat no all one.
Sheep hab de worst of food, yet him satisfy.
Shoes alone know if stockings hab hole.
Sickness ride horse come, take foot go away.
Sick man no care fe what doctor care.
Sleep hab no massa.
Spider an' fly can't make bargain.
Stranger no know where de deep water in de pass.
Sweet mout' fly follow coffin go a' hole.
Sweet soup make man drink ants.

Table-napkin want to turn table-cloth.

Talk is de ear food.

Talk some, lef (leave) some.

1 ^ 0 NEGRO PROVERBS.

'Tan (stand) far (off) see better.

" Tank you" no buy half bit bread.

Tiger no 'fraid fe bull-dog^.

Time longer dan rope. —

To-day fe me, to-morrow fe you.

'Tone (stone) walls hab eyea^

Too much sit down break trowsers.

Tree look eber so sound, woodpecker know what will do fe

him.
Trouble in de bush, Annancy bring him in dc house. j>
Trouble neber blow shell (trumpet).
Trouble neber set in like a rain. Nx/>
Two bull can't 'tan (stand) in one penn. ^"
Two cunning man can't share three bits (a shilling and a

penny half-penny).
Water more dan flour. \S
What man no know is good fe know.
When ashes cold, dog sleep dere.
When belly full, jaw must stop.
When belly full, man break pot.
When black man tief, him tief half a bit (twopence farthing),

when buckra tief, him tief whole estate.
When bowl go, packy (a small calabash) come.
When breeze no blow, you no see fowl's back.
When breeze no blow, tree no shake.
When bull ole, him feed a' fence side.
When bull ole, you take hog-meat tee-tie (the trailing stem

of a wild convolvulus) fe tie him.
When bull ole, him horn bend.
When bull foot broke, him nyam wi' monkey.
When burying day a' your door, you no pick an' choose

gravedigger.
When cloud come, sun no set. ^

When cockroach make dance, him no ax (invite) fowl.
When cocoa-head meet rich soil, de root bore de ground.
When cotton-tree fall, billy-goat jump over him.
When cow dead, mule laugh.

NEGRO PROVERBS. 181

When cow no hab tail, Goramighty brush fly.

When crab no hab hole, him neber get fat.

When crab walk too much, him lose him claw.

When dog hab too much owner, him sleep widout supper."

When dog maugre, him eye red.

When dog nyam egg, him neber leave off.

When drum done play, Jacky done dance. —

When yie (eye) meet yie, man 'fraid.

When yie (eye) no see, mout' can't talk. "

When fire an' water dere, anybody can lib.

When fish come out of sea an' tell you alligator hab fever,

believe him. -
When fowl merry, hawk catch him chicken.
When fowl done eat, him wipe him mout' 'pon de ground.—
When fowl hab teeth (impossibility).
When fowl drink water him lif up him head an' say, "Tank

God, tank God ! " but man drink water an' no say noting

(nothing).
When Guinea-fowl cry, him say, Woman no fe play.
When hand full, him hab plenty company.
When hog dead, him no care fe hot water.
When jackass carry salt, him lick de hamper.
When man a magistrate, crooked da follow him.
When man no done grow, him neber should cuss long man.
When man hab raw meat, look fe fire.
When man say him no mind, den him mind.
When man hab plenty, him boil pot.
When man no done climb hill, him should neber trow away

him stick.
When man no done cross ribber, him should neber cuss

alligator long mout'.
When man dead, grass grow a' him door.
When man drunk, him walk an' 'tagger, woman sit down

an' consider.
When man lib well an' grow fat, him walk in pasture an'

tell cow " How-dye."
When morass catch fire, land-turtle look for mangrove tree.
N

182 NEGRO PROVERBS.

When pigeon merry, hawk near.

When pot full, pot cover nyam some.

When puss hab money, him buy cheese. ,

When puss gone out, ratta take him house fe himself.

When puss belly full, him say rat bitter. s^S

When puss dead, ratta take him skin fe make bag.

When ram-goat foot broke, him find him massa door.

When tiger get ole, dog bark after him.

When trouble catch bull-dog, puppy breeches fit him.

When you sleep wi' dog, you catch him flea. \^

When you trow rockatone (stone) at pig-stye, de pig you

yerry cry " Quee, quee " is de one you hit.
Words mus' die, but man may lib.
Work is no evil. It is de yies (eyes) dat are cowards.
Woman rain neber done.

Yellow snake an' fowl no compartner.

You eber see empty bag 'tan' up ?

You eber see puss refuse butter ?

You neber see de day dog nyam dog.

You neber see dog chaw razor.

You neber see empty pot boil over. "

You no see mammy, you seek grandy (grandmother).

You shake man han', you no shake him heart.

EDINBUKGH : T. AND A. CONSTABLE,
PRINTERS TO THE QUEEN, AND TO THE UNIVERSITY.

88 Princes Street,

Edinburgh, May 1873.

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88 PRINCES STREET, EDINBURGH. 23

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